


Six to Eight Months

by auroralynches (teresavampa)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Drabble Collection, Extended Metaphors, Ficlet Collection, Fluff and Angst, Introspection, Minor Character Death, Multi, No Plot/Plotless, OT5 Friendship, One Shot Collection, POV Multiple, Pillow & Blanket Forts, Ronan and Adam are soft dads, The Raven King Spoilers, Underage Drinking, ambiguous Sarchengsey, frequent mentions of Noah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-06-05 13:09:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 26,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6705604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teresavampa/pseuds/auroralynches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of oneshots set between Chapter 67 of TRK and the epilogue. Feelings are felt, resolutions are had, puppies are petted. Sometimes there's angst, but sometimes there's also bad jokes and rainy days and warm conversations, and maybe a little kissing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. November 17th

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time (aka yesterday morning) I thought of a bunch of short fic ideas set between the end and epilogue of The Raven King, and wondered why more people weren't writing them. Then I remembered I technically have the ability to put words into sentences, so I decided to write them myself. You can decide for yourself whether or not that was a good idea.

Aurora Lynch never gets a true funeral.

It makes sense, after all—there aren’t really legal or religious protocols for how to handle death by demonic unmaking in a magic forest that no longer exists—but some small part of Ronan that remembers his mother’s joyful, open-hearted approach to faith still stings at the knowledge that she can’t receive the proper rites. He’d thought his father’s funeral had been unbearable, but this complete nothingness marking the end of his mother’s life, as though she had never existed at all, is somehow infinitely more hideous.

So it’s decided that the Lynch brothers will hold a wake, a solid Irish Catholic wake, two weeks after Aurora’s death. There’s no body and no casket, and Gansey says that he thinks that technically makes it a visitation and not a wake, but terminology is the last thing on anyone’s minds when they gather in the living room of the Barns. They're a laughably small group, and it’s painful to think that a woman as loving as Aurora should be left with only seven people to remember her.

It gets a little bit less painful when someone digs a bottle of whiskey out of a kitchen cabinet, however.

Adam doesn’t drink, of course, and Ronan and Declan both smack Matthew’s hand away from the bottle, but Gansey and, to Ronan’s surprise, Blue both accept a glass easily enough. Opal, recently named, grabs the bottle experimentally, only for Ronan to quickly snatch it away. “No fucking way, kid,” he says, setting it firmly out of her reach on the coffee table.

Blue, curled with her legs tucked underneath her in an armchair opposite him, raises her eyebrows incredulously over her glass. “Really? You’ll let her eat Styrofoam but not drink alcohol?” she asks.

“I don’t recall asking your opinion, Sargent,” Ronan says easily, taking a large swallow that burns his throat. He’s never been a big fan of hard alcohol, preferring to stick to beer, but at the moment, he can see the comfort in it. He’s no longer in that horrible, remote place he’d gone directly after his mother’s death, and the sick, churning misery of fresh grief has slowly begun to subside as well, but the relative stillness he’s feeling tonight is still a welcome respite, as though all of the horror of the last few weeks has been suspended in the whiskey, diluted to a more manageable state.

Of course, Ronan considers, it’s also possible that this has something to do with Adam’s presence next to him. They’re not sitting close, not even touching—Declan and Matthew don’t know yet, and their mother’s wake doesn’t exactly seem like an appropriate venue for telling them—but just knowing he’s there is soothing, the faint awareness of his breath stilling the restlessness Ronan had once thought could never be tamed.

He wonders if he’ll ever get used to feeling this quiet.

The wake carries on and the mood picks up, but Ronan stays silent, rolling his now-empty glass between his palms and over his thighs. His mother had once told him that when you die, God will answer every question you’ve ever had. Ronan wonders if she’s getting those answers now. He doesn’t know if she’d even had any questions. _How unfair it is_ , he muses, _that children should love their parents so much and never really know them._

Matthew, seated in an armchair that seems impossibly delicate compared to his solid, bearlike body, is halfway through a story about the first time he’d ever heard Aurora curse when Ronan stands and heads for the back door. “Going to check on the animals,” he murmurs by way of an excuse. It’s a poor one—almost all of the creatures of the Barns were unmade when Aurora was—but no one moves to stop him.

Unthinkingly, Ronan’s feet bring him back to the barn he’d gone to on the night of his eighteenth birthday, just after he’d kissed Adam for the first time, when he’d felt light enough to fly, to dissolve, to be kind to Declan without even thinking. Instead of triumphantly climbing onto the roof, however, he leans his back against the side of the barn and sinks to the ground, the cold metal of the wall biting at his skin through the fabric of his shirt. He misses the sounds of living animals in the fields and buildings and forest. He misses the lilting Irish music that had so often floated out through the windows of the farmhouse and over the barns on warm summer afternoons. He misses Cabeswater and its strangely familiar magic.

He misses his parents.

It’s a statement that seems stupidly obvious until it’s actually felt. Ronan realizes that this is why he had needed to be alone, so he doesn’t have to try to explain what _I miss my parents_ actually means. Saying the words does nothing to communicate the full-body ache of loss, his every heartbeat throbbing the words through his body and pounding them into the ground beneath his feet: _I miss my parents I miss my parents I miss my parents_. He doesn’t cry; he knows this is a different beast than mourning. He won’t grieve forever, but he’s going to miss his parents for the rest of his life.

A rustling in the grass draws his attention, and when he looks up, Declan is rounding the corner of the barn. “Hey, bro,” he says. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t planning on freezing to death out here.”

Ronan shakes his head. “You’re stuck with me,” he confirms.

Declan allows him a small smile, then paces closer and sits in the half-frozen grass beside him. For a moment, neither of them speaks, letting the silence of the cold night roll around them. Finally, Declan breaks it. “You don’t blame yourself for this, right?”

Ronan looks at him, surprised. Although things between him and Declan have been improving lately, he hadn’t thought his brother would consider him deeply enough to realize how easily guilt gnaws at Ronan’s soul. He tastes the question for a long moment before answering honestly, “No. At first I wanted to, but I figured—everyone in that house except Matthew was there for pretty much all the same steps in that goddamn nightmarish chain of events that got Mom killed as I was, but it’s obviously not their faults, so why would it be mine?”

Declan observes, “That’s a surprisingly mature mentality, Ronan.”

“Thanks,” Ronan says. “I’m a surprisingly mature person.”

There’s another, longer silence, and then—

“Ronan?” Declan says, a little more quietly. There’s an edge of something in his voice that’s almost like hesitation, like he’s not totally sure that what he’s about to say is the right thing. It’s a side of his brother Ronan can’t remember ever seeing before.

“Yeah?” Ronan prompts.

“I like Adam. I think you’re good together.” Declan does not look at him when he says this. Their friendship is still new, raw, fragile as a house of cards, and Ronan can tell he’s leaving a barrier in case this is the move that brings it all down again. It’s a barrier he’s built often enough himself.

Ronan considers all the implications of Declan’s statement. He’s been planning to tell his brothers anyways—not yet, but soon, once their mother’s death isn’t so fresh—but if Declan already knows, there’s no sense keeping it from Matthew. Once again, he’s surprised by just how well his older brother knows him. A few months ago, Ronan would have hated Declan for this. He would have made some sarcastic comment about being overjoyed to receive Declan’s blessing before stalking off, feeling angry and humiliated and uncomfortably transparent. Now, though, he simply tilts his head back to clear his mind in the stars before replying, “Thanks.” Curiosity bites at him, and he adds, “How did you…?”

Declan breathes a small sigh. “I suspected,” he admits, “for a long time. But it’s gotten a lot more obvious lately. I mean, the way you look and act around each other—it didn’t take too much effort to realize that something was going on. And seeing as we spent two years barely talking to each other because I kept so many secrets, I thought that maybe I should try giving honesty a shot instead.”

“Well,” Ronan says, “thanks. For being honest.” He thinks for a moment, then adds, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think Ashley is the worst person in the world.”

Declan makes a noise that’s caught somewhere between a groan and a laugh. “Thank you for the ringing endorsement, Ronan,” he says drily.

“You’re so welcome.”

From the back porch, a square of yellow light floods over the grass. Matthew gallops out the open door towards them, Opal cantering along behind him. The doorway illuminates Adam’s silhouette leaning against the frame. As Ronan shoves himself to his feet and trudges to meet Matthew and Opal halfway, Adam’s features come into dim focus. Ronan greets the younger Lynches with a halfheartedly gruff, “Hey, brat,” and pushes them both back in the direction of the house, Declan trailing a few feet behind.

When he reaches the threshold, Adam meets his eyes and asks quietly, “Everything okay?”

Declan glances at them both before slipping past them into the house.

“Weirdly,” Ronan replies, “yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there we go. I have no idea how many more of these there will be, but I promise you they mostly won't be as serious or as long as this.
> 
> This particular work was brought to you by me having entirely too many feelings about every single scene at the Barns in TRK and, for reasons too complicated to get into, that one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine with Katey Sagal. It was knocked out in a few hours and in a tense (present) that I don't normally use, so there are almost definitely grammatical errors, but like, who fucking cares, honestly?
> 
> Also, all the chapter titles will be dates, but they're just guesses, so if I fuck up any timeline-related stuff, my bad. Honestly, between the circular time and all the math errors, the timeline of this series gives me a headache, so I'm not playing super hard and fast with canon established dates anyways.


	2. June 13th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to Katherine (jehanthepoet on Tumblr) for prompting this one!

Blue knocks at the door to Adam’s apartment in a self-conscious sort of way. The summer heat is especially thick in the still, cramped second floor of the St. Agnes office, and she’s acutely aware that it’s been nearly a year since she was last up here, back when they were still dating. Adam had recently decided to move out of his apartment and into the Barns; while Ronan himself isn’t technically allowed to live there until Matthew turns eighteen, there’s nothing stopping Adam from making it his home. Although Adam owns few enough possessions that he could easily move out of St. Agnes entirely on his own, Blue had offered to help him pack anyways, and he had agreed. Now that she’s actually standing outside his door, though, she wonders if this is the best idea. They’re good friends now, their romantic awkwardness long resolved, but they still so rarely spend time together without at least one other person there that she doesn’t entirely trust them not to fight.

Adam opens the door on the second knock, his Aglionby uniform hanging over one arm. Although Blue has already graduated, Aglionby still has a couple of weeks left of school, and the fact that it’s the end of the year hasn’t stopped Adam from devoutly attending all of his classes and extracurriculars. Adam Parrish may live above a church, but he worships no god but his own future.

Blue knows, however, that that future contains far more farms and BMWs and strange, goat-legged daughters than originally planned.

“Howdy,” she says.

“Hey,” he says.

Adam steps silently back into the apartment, allowing her to enter. She scans the splintered floor, the bumpy walls, the low, fractured ceiling, and wonders how it’s possible that this place can seem even smaller than it had before. Maybe, she thinks, it’s just that Adam is allowing himself to take up more space than he used to, claiming each room he inhabits instead of folding himself into the crevices left by other people.

“So, what can I help pack?” she asks, clasping her hands in front of her.

Adam gestures vaguely to the plastic tubs that make up his furniture. “You can just put anything still sitting around into those,” he says. He’s stopped hiding his accent during the past few months; nowadays, it softly molds all of his words into the same smooth shape as Blue’s, and she’s fiercely grateful for this reminder of their common ground.

Even after over a year here, Adam still has so few possessions in his apartment, but Blue does the best she can, carefully piling papers from the shelf beside the door into one of the emptier tubs. She fiddles with a scrap of creamy paper edged with what looks like real silver filigree that's been mixed in with the mail and old schoolwork. She doesn’t have to ask to know that this is one of Ronan’s dreams.

Blue has never been one for small talk, but she feels the urge to make it now, if only to distract the both of them from the suffocating heat and the memory of the last time she was here. “Is it weird knowing that you’re gonna graduate soon?” she asks. When Adam gives her a slightly bemused look, she clarifies, “Like, you spent the last, what, three years working your tail off for this school, and now it’s almost over. I mean, I feel weird about leaving Mountain View, and I was about a thousand percent less devoted to that place than you were to Aglionby.”

Adam’s mouth quirks. “Yeah, it’s weird,” he admits. “I’m still half expecting it to all turn out to be fake.”

“Well,” Blue reassures him, “if it’s fake, then at least they suckered me as well as you.” She waves a stack of college acceptance letters and scholarship offers at him. When he first received all of them, she had expected to feel at least a small sting of jealousy—her top acceptance letter had not been nearly so glamorous or generous as even the worst of Adam’s offers—but instead, to her relief, she had been nothing but overjoyed for her friend.

Adam smiles at her, a real smile, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and glows from every feature of his face. It’s a smile that happens so frequently these days that Blue often forgets how unhappy Adam had been until recently.

The quiet resumes as they continue to pack. Blue hums a little, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet as she attempts to find more things to put into the half-empty tub she’s packing. Her gaze snags on a piece of paper that, from the looks of it, fell behind the shelf some time ago. It hisses against the wall as she pulls it out for examination and classification as trash or treasured memory. It’s a letter printed on Aglionby stationary.

Adam notices her looking at it and wanders over. When he recognizes the letter, he says, “Oh, that’s just some fundraising notice I forgot to throw away. You can trash it.”

Blue doesn’t respond. Her thumb is gently stroking the embossed Aglionby letterhead at the top of the page, but it’s not what’s captured her focus. Near the bottom of the page, the letter takes special care to thank the school’s top donors from the previous year’s event. One of the names is Czerny.

“Oh,” Adam says softly.

Just like that, Blue’s face crumples. When they’d gotten back to 300 Fox Way on the night that Gansey had died and been revived for the second time, Calla had told them all that Noah was gone. Rationally, Blue knows that it was the right thing for him, that Noah had been miserable in his last months of existence, that it’s been longer since that night than the entire time she’d known him, but none of that seems to matter right about now. All she can think of is the kind, shy boy who gave her her first kiss, and she aches with the knowledge that she will never get to talk to him again.

She turns without thinking to press her face into Adam’s chest; he reaches without thinking to wrap his arms around her. They stand there together for several minutes, neither of them speaking, Blue just letting her hot, silent tears spill over her cheeks and seep into Adam’s shirt. When she finally feels she can speak without her voice cracking, she pulls her face back and says without looking up, “I feel stupid.” Adam doesn’t say anything, so she continues, “I mean, I thought I was done being sad about him. I haven’t cried like that in months, and then—”

Adam’s arms tighten around her. “It’s not stupid,” he argues. “It’s human.”

Blue presses her face back against him for just a moment, then steps back and wipes her eyes. “Okay, let’s get back to work, shall we?” she says, forcing cheer back into her voice.

Adam evaluates her for a moment, then says, “No.”

“What?”

“I said no. You’re sad, and I don’t want you to pretend like you’re not sad.” Adam has become a lot more blunt and stubborn over the past few months, and given that he had already possessed those two qualities in abundance, arguing with him has gone from a challenging sport to the conversational equivalent of hurling yourself very fast at a brick wall. Blue is quite certain he picked this up from Ronan, and she makes a mental note to complain about that later.

“Well, I can’t think of anything that might make this better, so you’re just going to have to deal,” Blue says, a little more snappishly than she’d intended. Adam frowns, and she mumbles, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Adam says, and he sounds like he means it. He picks up the keys to the BMW (the Hondayota having gasped its last breath a month previously) and opens the apartment door. “And,” he adds, “I actually  _ do _ know something that might cheer you up.”

Blue follows him curiously to the parking lot, where he unlocks the car and settles into the driver’s seat. She slides comfortably into the passenger seat and punches the radio on. It’s tuned to the same awful electronic station as always, but she finds that the artificial sound is strangely comfortable, like the noise of it numbs everything inside her just a little bit. Ronan hasn’t been an enigma to her in a long time, but she feels like maybe she understands the person he used to be.

They drive through winding streets to the edge of town while synthetic beats diffuse through the car and a woman with a curiously childlike voice croons about the ocean and unraveling. The song comes to a breathy finish just as Adam turns onto a two-track dirt road worn into a brown field. Blue’s never been to the trailer park, but she knows Henrietta well enough to know that this road leads to it. Instead of following it all the way down, however, Adam pulls the car into the dry, weedy grass of the surrounding field, parks it at an angle, and climbs out into the summer heat. Blue has no idea how standing in a field in the middle of nowhere is supposed to make her feel better, but she trusts Adam, so she shoves open the passenger door and joins him where he’s leaning against the hood.

“So,” she says.

“So,” he agrees.

Flicking a gnat off her shoulder, Blue says, “Adam, I don’t mean to be rude, but if anything, this is making me feel worse.” In response, Adam only grins and slips something small and silver and painfully shiny out of his hip pocket. When she shields her eyes with her hand and squints, Blue can just make out that it’s a whistle. Adam puts it to his lips.

There’s no sound for a moment, either from the whistle or from anything else. This corner of Henrietta has always been weirdly silent, devoid of the shrilling birds and rustling insects that provide the soundtrack for most of the town. Slowly, however, Blue hears something that she recognizes as the thumping of a four-legged animal running very fast. She braces herself.

The dog hits Adam almost too quickly to see. There’s a small hill blocking the view of the trailer park from the mouth of the road, and the span of time between the dog emerging from behind the hill and the dog making contact with Adam is so brief that Blue’s brain struggles to even conceptualize it. In an instant, the silence has been replaced with the high-pitched keening of a dog that is extremely glad to see someone who’s been gone a long time.

Adam sinks to the ground to allow the overjoyed creature greater access to his face and lap. Blue can tell that they’re well-acquainted, watching Adam alternately rubbing the dog’s head and chest as she flips frantically on top of him, apparently trying to simultaneously lick his face, beg for a belly rub, and wrap herself around his entire body. Blue has never particularly thought of Adam as a dog person, but the joy on his face is so palpable that she feels it start to infect her in spite of herself.

She kneels beside the pair, and the dog twists and kicks off of Adam’s thigh to propel herself over to say hello. Laughing, Blue strokes the short, coarse hairs of the dog’s back and jerks her head backwards to avoid an unwanted face-licking. The dog—definitely female, now that she’s had a moment to observe—is a thick-bodied, muscular creature of indeterminate age and breed. Her tongue lolls from the side of her muzzle as she leans heavily against Blue’s torso. Blue loves her instantly.

“Why do you have a dog whistle? Is this  _ your _ dog?” she asks Adam, wrapping an arm over the dog’s back to rub her side.

Adam shakes his head. “No, she lives with my old neighbors. I used to feed her scraps whenever I’d take out the trash. And the whistle was something Ronan dreamed up last night.”

“Convenient.”

“Maybe it’s fate,” Adam says jokingly. When Blue pulls a face, he adds, “Or serendipity, or just actual, random coincidence. Those do happen, despite what Gansey says.”

“Well, whatever it is, it worked out well enough. She certainly missed you,” Blue observes. Sure enough, the dog has already returned to demand Adam’s attention, butting her head against him until he agrees to pet her more.

Adam smiles, but gently pushes at the dog’s side to guide her back to Blue. “Go, go,” he urges. “You’re here to cheer her up, not me.”

“Oh,” Blue assures him, “she’s already done that just fine.” She watches him rub the stumps of the dog’s ears between his thumb and forefinger and feels the last of her melancholy melt away. It occurs to her that this loving, comfortable young man before her would be unrecognizable to the Adam Parrish and Blue Sargent who had first spoken in the Nino’s parking lot, and she’s abruptly painfully glad for it. Her sadness about Noah has been transmuted into gratitude for the good that he allowed into all of their lives; without him, none of their present happiness would even be possible. She’s never given much thought to the possibility of an afterlife, but she hopes that Noah is somewhere that he can see how much he means to them.

She shifts back to the present and realizes that Adam is speaking to her, though she has no idea what he just said. “Beg pardon?” she asks.

“I was asking how your big road trip plans were coming,” Adam says, scratching the top of the dog’s head and causing her eyes to close with pleasure.

“Oh! They’re pretty much finalized,” Blue says. She feels obligated to add, “You know, you and Ronan are always welcome to come along.”

Adam laughs and shakes his head. “Again, we’re really fine staying here,” he tells her with the well-worn cadence of a sentiment he’s had to express dozens of times to her, Gansey, and Henry. “Besides, the logistics would be a nightmare. I mean, what would we do with Opal? I’m sure y’all don’t want her along—”

“Hey, we all like Opal just fine!” Blue protests.

“That is a response to an entirely different statement,” Adam says mildly. “And anyways, we can’t leave her behind, either. Even if there was someone looking after her, we’d come back to find she’s eaten or destroyed half of Henrietta.”

Blue shrugs. “Whatever. I still think you’re using your kid as an excuse to spend all your time in domestic bliss.” She tries to say the last two words sarcastically and falls miles short. It’s hard to be sarcastic about happiness when she knows both Adam and Ronan went so long without it.

“That,” Adam replies, “is essentially accurate.”

Once again, they fall into silence, but this time, it’s the easy, comfortable quiet of two friends who don’t need to fill the space between them with sound. Blue leans back on her palms and stretches her legs out in front of her; Adam shifts slightly closer so that the dog can lay across both of their laps at once. Closing her eyes and turning her face to the sinking afternoon sun, Blue allows herself a moment to enjoy the fact that she has friends who will do things like drive her around town to pet a dog just because she’s sad. It’s been more than a year since she was first drawn into the hurricane of friendship that is her raven boys, but the thrill of knowing there are people who understand her on every level has yet to fade.

The sun is more than halfway to the horizon when Adam checks his watch and shifts his half of the dog off of his lap. “We really should go,” he says, brushing dog hair off of his pants and fishing in his pocket for the car keys. “There’ll be traffic on this road soon enough.”

Blue carefully extricates herself from under the dog and allows Adam to help her to her feet. The dog whines and presses herself against their legs, but Adam only has to point down the road for her to understand that it’s time for her to go home. Back in the car, Blue lets the music from the electronic station rise and shift and hiss through her like the tides. It’s not late, but she feels a pleasant, sun-weary exhaustion of the sort usually associated with day trips to the beach creep its way through her body.

By the time the car pulls into the lot at Monmouth Manufacturing, she’s at peace again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Blue and Adam listen to in the car is "Spirals (feat. King Deco)" by Sound Remedy & Illenium. It's not a particularly thematically relevant song, just a good one.
> 
> I said future chapters of this fic would be happier and shorter and I was wrong on both counts. I'm so sorry. I'm really not trying to be wordy or sad.


	3. December 1st

Monmouth Manufacturing is either the greatest or worst building Henry Cheng has ever been in. Possibly, he thinks, it’s both. The place is certainly grand, full of soaring ceilings and countless many-paned windows and artistically messy scraps of Gansey’s pet projects past and present; however, it’s also probably the least efficient use of space he’s ever encountered, and the presence of bathroom fixtures in the kitchen—or possibly kitchen fixtures in the bathroom—is still giving him heart palpitations.

He returns to the common room (which also appears to be Gansey’s bedroom) with a drink in his hand and seats himself in the desk chair, holding himself a little ways apart from the rest of the group. Blue and Gansey seem to like him just fine, and even Parrish and Lynch are beginning to thaw, but this fast, all-or-nothing type of friendship is still new to him, and he’s not yet sure they won’t suddenly decide they don’t want him around anymore.

Of course, his choice of the desk chair has as much to do with the inefficiency of the furniture of the room as it does with metaphors for friendship. The only other seating options are a leather armchair that even Henry finds intimidatingly swank, Gansey’s bed (currently occupied by the man himself, sitting cross-legged at the very end, a casual king on his high thread count throne), an overgrown leather sofa (currently occupied by a sprawled Adam Parrish and the Opal girl, who seems to be chewing a hole through the arm of the couch), and the floor (currently occupied by Blue Sargent and Ronan Lynch, both casually arranged to give the impression that it’s by mere coincidence that they happen to be sitting within physical contact range of their respective boyfriends). Henry strongly feels that the scene could use a few more chairs, and possibly an ottoman.

“Opal, stop that,” Adam murmurs, nudging the girl with his foot. Opal removes her mouth from the couch, but takes great pains to pretend that it was an entirely independent idea executed of her own volition. Adam smiles fondly at her.

Henry clears his throat. “So, I’m sorry, but I have to ask—why does it seem your bathroom has mated with your kitchen to produce some unholy, unhygienic offspring?” he asks the room at large.

“Oh my God, _thank_ _you_ ,” Blue exclaims, twisting her head to give pointed looks to each of the three other boys in turn. “I’ve been saying Ronan and Gansey are gonna die of food poisoning for months.”

“And yet here we still are,” Ronan mocks. Blue flips him off.

“I’m just saying,” Henry continues, “you have literally thousands of square feet here. Why on Earth would you choose to, pardon the expression, shit where you eat? Like, over there.” He gestures towards a seemingly unused door in the apartment. “Why not just move the fridge and microwave in that room?”

The easy, comfortable mood of the room vanishes in an instant, replaced by something dark and cold and formless. Gansey stares at his hands. Blue looks like she’s about to cry. Adam explains quietly, “That was Noah’s room.”

And, _oh_. Henry had been told about Noah—not the Aglionby version, the ghost version, the one who had been the fifth member of this little family before him—after Gansey was revived, but it hadn’t seemed _real_ until now. It’s only now, looking at the expressions on all of their faces, that it fully sinks in: these people lost one of their best friends.

It’s Ronan, oddly enough, who breaks the tension. “I don’t know, man, we can’t just never use anything that used to be Noah’s ever again,” he says. Henry feels almost like Ronan’s coming to his defense, despite the fact that Ronan has done his level best to completely ignore Henry’s existence for as long as they’ve known each other. Ronan continues, “Don’t get me wrong, I miss the creepy little fucker, but we can’t just leave his shit alone and untouched for the rest of our lives.”

“Ronan,” Gansey says warningly.

Ronan persists. “What? If we can’t use Noah’s room because we have memories of Noah there, then I guess we can’t use my room, either, because he used to fuck with my dream stuff sometimes. Or the parking lot, because he liked to screw around down there. Or my window.”

“Your _window?_ ” Adam echoes. “Oh—God, you threw him out it once, right?”

Ronan’s knife-slash grin is all the answer any of them need.

Blue laughs, a clear bell of a sound that draws all eyes to her. “I just realized that means no one’s allowed to use Gansey’s bed anymore either,” she says, reaching one hand up to pat the top mattress as she says so.

Trying to discern the implications of Blue’s statement takes Henry’s mind to a rather lewd place, and a glance at the gapes on the other boys’ faces tells him he’s not the only one. “I beg your pardon?” Gansey manages.

Blue lets out a magnificently disgusted snort. “Oh, not _that_. Get your minds out of the gutter. I was only talking about me and Noah making out on Gansey’s bed one time,” she says casually.

The clarification does nothing to curb anyone’s astonishment. “ _What?!_ ” demand the other three boys, each for clearly different reasons. Gansey is the only one with the presence of mind to add, “When was this?”

Blue shrugs. “This past summer. You and Adam were in D.C. for your mom’s campaign thing, and Ronan was I think off with Matthew or Kavinsky. I came over here, I ended up telling him about my curse, he pointed out that he was already dead and I couldn’t hurt him, and—and—look, it was _nice_ , okay?” She finishes her statement a little bit defensively.

Gansey says, “Well, that was… decent of him.”

Ronan says, “Go, Noah.”

Adam says, “We were _dating_ then.”

Ronan laughs uproariously. Blue sticks her tongue out at him. Henry watches and says nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If it's under 1000 words, it still technically counts as a drabble, right?
> 
> The next two chapters/drabbles are also Henry POV things about his early relationship with the gang. They are short and contain absolutely no angst, because I'm really, really trying not to let this fic get bogged down with wordy weepiness and drama.


	4. December 15th

“What?!”

Three different and equally unpleasant expressions hang before Henry. Adam looks skeptical and unimpressed, like his opinion of Henry has just fallen several notches. Ronan is weirdly furious. And Gansey’s face is a mask of betrayal so tragic Henry almost wants to apologize.

Only Blue still looks normal and non-hostile. “Guys,” she says, “all he said was that he didn’t know how to drive a stick shift.”

The boys’ response, a chaotic bluster of horror and disappointment, is so emphatic that Blue should be knocked over by the gale force of the hot air exiting their mouths. Instead, she rolls her eyes and holds out a flat palm. “Ignore them, Henry, I’ll teach you myself. Gansey, give me the keys to the Pig.”

“Really? _You’ll_ teach him?” Ronan asks scathingly. Blue glares.

Gansey tries to be a bit more tactful. “But you have almost no practice driving a manual yourself,” he argues, but in a polite way. “I just think that in the interest of safety—”

Blue snorts irritably. “Safety!” What she doesn’t say, but everyone knows she’s thinking, is that Richard Campbell “safe as life” Gansey III is not in any position to be lecturing Blue Sargent on safety. “Listen, we’re just going to drive to my house and back a few times. It’ll be good practice for both of us.” With that, she tugs the keys from Gansey’s hand and marches towards the apartment door. “Henry, let’s go.”

When they’re settled in the car, Blue jams the driver’s seat as far forward as it will go and strains to adjust the mirrors on each side of the car. The Camaro is as finicky as always, and she has to twist the key in the ignition a few times before the engine catches and turns over. After a few false starts, they’re on their way out of the parking lot and down the street, though admittedly at a significantly slower pace than the posted speed limit encourages. Henry watches Blue peer out at the empty street with a look of tense concentration on her face and takes a guess.

“So, you’re not a fan of driving, either?” he asks.

Blue twists her mouth wryly. “I just never get a chance to practice,” she says. “The car at home always belongs to someone else, and the boys don’t like for me to drive us places because, well—” She flaps a hand at the ten-year-old on a bicycle who has just easily overtaken them.

Henry makes a humming noise of understanding. There’s a hint of wistfulness to her voice that makes him feel like Blue is sharing more with him than her words would suggest, and so he tries to reciprocate. “I don’t think Parrish and Lynch like me very much,” he admits. He can’t tell if this is a non sequitur or not. It doesn’t feel like it.

It’s something that’s been frustrating him for over a month, ever since he first began to fall into the personal atmosphere of this strange and magical crew. He knows, based on his conversations with Blue and Gansey and the flashes he’s seen of the real Parrish and Lynch, that he could get along with them very well. There’s something in their wild magic, their disdain for Aglionby, their sense of being _something more_ , that Henry feels echo in his own soul. (And he has to admit, it’s nice knowing that there are Aglionby students outside of himself and the other residents of Litchfield House who are neither straight nor named Tad Carruthers.) But although they’ve been polite to him since the night of Gansey’s second death, his attempts to actually befriend them have been met with firm disinterest.

Blue glances at him, surprised. “What, Adam and Ronan?” she says. She thinks for a moment, then says, “I don’t think they _dis_ like you, if that’s what you’re worried about. They just only care about maybe ten people in the entire world, and it takes a while to earn a spot on that list. Like, it took Ronan literally five months to call me anything other than _maggot_ or _terrorist_.”

“Are you telling me _asshole_ is actually an upgrade?”

“Strange but true.” Blue comes to a full stop, then punches down on the clutch and shoves the gearshift back into first, the car shrieking and jolting as they jerkily accelerate again. She breathes a mild curse word, but manages to get them moving smoothly again without stalling the engine. “I mean, full disclosure, I was dating Adam for a couple of those months, so I’m sure Ronan hated me a lot more than if I had been just a new friend like you. But still, I know what you mean. It’s like the fact that their approval is hard to get makes you want it that much more, right?”

Henry nods vigorously, feeling impossibly lucky that Blue Sargent understands him so well. “Yes, exactly.”

“Right, well, just remember that feeling like you need their approval doesn’t mean you actually do. Gansey and I both like you, so Adam and Ronan are just going to have to deal with that,” she says firmly. “Besides, they’re the ones being jerks. It’s not your responsibility to get them to behave better.” With this, she hauls up the parking brake and opens the car door. Henry realizes that they’re already at the curb outside 300 Fox Way.

“Okay,” Blue says, “now it’s your turn.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Learning to drive stick shift from someone who's also still learning to drive stick shift is very fun, actually. I recommend it.


	5. January 3rd

Henry’s just gotten back to Henrietta after the holiday break, and maybe it’s the jetlag from the flight, but he’s having serious difficulty figuring out how five people are fitting into a single couch, even if one is a half-goat creature the size of a six-year-old girl and another is Blue Sargent. From what he can blearily make out, Ronan is sitting with his back to one arm of the sofa and his feet on the cushions, and Adam, most of the way to unconsciousness, is slotted in directly in front of him, his head resting exhaustedly on Ronan’s chest. Opal is perched on the back of the couch just above him, while Blue has nestled herself beneath Adam’s legs and has co-opted them as a stand for Gansey’s laptop. Gansey himself sits on the far arm of the sofa, looking over the scene with an affectionate softness in his face.

Henry wanders over, curious to see what’s captured their attention. “What’s this, then?” he asks, waving a hand vaguely at the laptop screen.

“Sargent’s new boyfriend,” Ronan says dismissively.

Blue halfheartedly glares at him, then cranes her neck to look at Henry. “Some environmental activist chained himself to a tree in Venezuela,” she explains. “I’m following the story. It’s pretty interesting, actually, he’s only about a year older than us. Look.” She offers the laptop up to him, and Henry scrolls quickly through the article. He’s only a paragraph in when he reads the guy’s name and almost drops the computer on Blue’s head.

“Oh, Jesus!” he exclaims, louder than he intended. Adam frowns, but doesn’t open his eyes, and Opal reaches down to pat his hand. Everyone else gives him a questioning look. “I know him,” Henry says. “He—we went to school together when we were younger. God, this is weird. He was actually my first kiss, back when I was, like, twelve.” He passes the laptop back to Blue and leans his elbows against the back of the couch. After a moment, he realizes everyone is looking at him oddly; even Adam has opened one eye. “What?”

“It’s just—of fucking _course_ your first kiss was with someone who ended up chaining himself to a tree,” Ronan says. “Jesus, that’s possibly the least surprising thing I’ve ever heard.”

“ ‘I’m Henry Cheng, and when I was born, I was personally delivered by Dr. Jonas Salk,’ ” Adam murmurs in an affectionately mocking tone that Henry’s heard everyone on the sofa use to mimic each other, but has never witnessed directed at himself before.

“Salk wasn’t an obstetrician, and I’m pretty sure he died before Henry was born,” Gansey points out, ever the pedant.

Ronan ignores him and says in the same tone as Adam, “ ‘I’m Henry Cheng, and every teacher I’ve ever had has had a weepy, inspirational biopic made about them.’ “

Henry’s face creases with confused laughter. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Ronan shrugs, which knocks Opal slightly off-balance on the sofa back. He reaches up to place a steadying hand on her back before explaining, “The other day we were joking that you’re so into that activism stuff—”

“You mean caring? About issues?” Henry snarks.

Ronan waves a hand dismissively. “Whatever. Anyways, we were saying that you’re so into that shit, it’s like you’re some Hollywood character trying to fight against a cynical government bureaucracy or teach a bunch of jaded teenagers to believe in themselves or what the fuck ever the latest Oscar bait bullshit is.”

“ _Stand and Deliver_ was playing on TV at the time,” Blue adds helpfully.

Henry is deeply flattered, even though his vanity is loudly insisting that he looks nothing like Edward James Olmos. “Aww, you guys talk about me when I’m not around?” he asks, making a sweet face at Ronan, who glares back.

“Don’t get cocky, Cheng,” Ronan warns.

Henry considers this for a moment, then says, “No, I think I will, actually. You guys like me.” He draws the word out— _you guys liiiiike me_ —and grins teasingly, prodding Ronan with his words.

Ronan takes a deep breath, but before he can say anything, Adam interjects, “Yeah, of course we like you. You’re our friend.” Henry beams. “Now,” Adam adds, closing his eyes again as he nestles a bit closer into the couch and into Ronan’s torso, “all of you, _shut the fuck up._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gosh, Henry and Ronan, Adam just wants to sleep. You'll have to save your blossoming friendship for another time.
> 
> Anyways, this is the last of the "Henry POV about Henry becoming friends with the gang" chunk of updates! I had a lot of fun writing these, and they cemented Blue and Henry's status as one of my favorite friendships in the series (though Blue and Ronan still have the ultimate friendship hold over my heart).


	6. April 13th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written for Katherine (jehanthepoet on tumblr) as an incentive/gift for doing her finals!

When Blue Sargent had taken her driver’s license test, she had thought no car passenger could be more nerve-wracking than a grim middle-aged man grading her every move. That young Blue Sargent had not expected Ronan Lynch.

He’s sitting in the passenger seat of the Camaro looking nothing short of scandalized that he’s not the one driving. Gansey’s reasoning for giving Blue the keys instead of him had been absolutely sound—after all, the last time Ronan drove the Camaro, he had wrapped the thing around a telephone pole—but to Ronan, who only sees Blue’s slow, inexperienced driving style and still-awkward gear shifting, it’s an insult on par with telling him to take a tricycle to pick up the BMW from Adam. Blue could tell him _well, maybe if you didn’t drive like a maniac_ or _you could have just waited for Gansey to get out of class_ , but she knows these will only further wound his pride.

The silence is killing her, and she doesn’t feel like listening to Ronan’s trashy electronica, so Blue fiddles with the radio until she finds a pop station. Something loud and bright and girly blares at top volume, and she grins.

Ronan breaks his sulk to complain, “I hate this song.”

“If you don’t like it, you can get out and walk,” Blue says.

“Walking might actually be faster with you behind the wheel,” Ronan shoots back.

Blue gives him a look which she hopes is witheringly sarcastic, but suspects is rather underwhelming. “Okay,” she says, “you can _walk_ to Boyd’s, then. It’s only, what, ten more miles? On busy roads? In seventy degree weather?” The BMW is at Boyd’s because Adam is at Boyd’s, and Adam is at Boyd’s because the Hondayota recently broke down thoroughly enough that he’d had to bring it in to get his coworkers’ help repairing it. That was three days ago, and in the meantime, he’s been getting around in Ronan’s car. Now that the Hondayota is fixed, Ronan needs to retrieve the BMW so Adam can take his own car back to St. Agnes. And of course all of this somehow means Blue has to drive Gansey’s car halfway across Henrietta while Ronan criticizes her driving.

They all so owe her for this one.

As the song wails through what is almost definitely a saxophone solo, a thought occurs to Blue. “Hey,” she says slowly, trying very hard to remain calm and nonjudgmental, “if Adam’s at work and you’re here, then who’s watching Opal?”

Ronan theatrically hits his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh, fuck! I knew I forgot something!” he exclaims.

Blue nearly swerves into a telephone pole herself. “Oh, Jesus, please tell me you’re joking,” she pleads. Visions of the Barns gutted, literally chewed apart from the inside, flit through her mind. Also, while Opal’s not human, she’s still a child, and Blue worries for her safety if she’s alone in a house full of dreams.

Ronan looks deeply offended. “Yes, Sargent, I’m joking,” he says. “Matthew’s visiting from D.C. so I had him pull babysitting duty. For fuck’s sake, how bad a parent do you think I am?”

“Well, you don’t have the most solid history of responsible decision-making,” Blue says.

“Fair,” Ronan concedes, nodding his head in acknowledgement. There’s a moment of comfortable silence where last year there would have been an argument, and then Ronan says, “So, I heard you yelled at the captain of the Aglionby swim team yesterday?”

“I yelled at an asshole yesterday. And how did you hear about that? You don’t even go to Aglionby anymore.”

“Henry told me. What’d he do?”

Sighing, Blue searches for a way to phrase it delicately. It’s not that she thinks Ronan would be bothered by the guy’s exact words—she knows he wouldn’t be—but the idea of repeating them makes her squirm. Much as she loves the boys, she’s not sure any of them understand how uncomfortable unwanted attention from strangers really is. “He requested that I get in his car and insinuated that I should… perform services normally rendered by prostitutes. So I called him some names that I picked up from you, and he got huffy and drove away.”

“Wow,” Ronan says reflectively. “You didn’t just fall instantly in love with him? And here I thought guys who called you a prostitute were your type.”

Blue rolls her eyes irritably. “Shut up, Ronan. God, you’re such an asshole.”

“You love me.”

“I know,” Blue says, “and I hate it.”

The car groans through an especially slow turn, and Ronan groans with it. “Christ al-fucking-mighty, Sargent, just let me drive! Gansey doesn’t have to know,” he pleads.

“No,” Blue snaps. “I need all the driving practice I can get, since God knows when I’ll be able to get my own car to practice on.”

Ronan briefly looks at her in a way that Blue can almost swear is thoughtful. Before she gets a chance to fully study it, however, the look is gone, carefully stowed away where Blue can’t examine it anymore. “Well,” Ronan says, “do you at least want me to call Boyd’s? I feel like that’s the polite thing to do, seeing as we’re not going to get there for another year.”

“Shut _up_ , Ronan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to post this yesterday, but I forgot.
> 
> Personally, I pictured Ronan and Blue listening to "Run Away With Me" by Carly Rae Jepsen. But I didn't want to limit anyone's interpretation, so they can be listening to any pop song you want as long as it might have a saxophone solo in it.
> 
> The title of this chapter is from "Sea Green, See Blue" by Jaymay, but you can't tell because it's exactly the same format as all the other chapter titles.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's been commenting and leaving kudos!


	7. May 4th

The way Adam sees it, Ronan Lynch is a force of nature. When they were younger—which hadn’t been that long ago, really, only a little less than a year, back before that chaotic, half-dreamt Fourth of July—he had been tearing himself apart like a screaming hurricane, a thrashing earthquake, a wildfire burning through life with no regard for how quickly he was running to ruin. That was the Ronan Lynch who stole and wrecked and recreated Gansey’s Camaro. That was the Ronan Lynch who fought continuously with Adam and Blue and everything else with a pulse. That was the Ronan Lynch who only really lived for the feeling of his foot crushing an accelerator and cold air rushing over him, alive, alive, alive.

Adam had loved that Ronan, too, but remotely, the same way he had loved Gansey and Noah and Blue, too certain of their impermanence in his life or his in theirs. From the moment he’d befriended them, he had been preparing for their absences again, especially Ronan’s. There had been long days—weeks—months where Adam thought Ronan was more likely and more willing to die than to finish high school.

Those darker, more frantic versions of Ronan and Adam would never recognize themselves today. They’ve stilled and settled against each other over the past half year or so until Ronan has become as much of a certainty in Adam’s life as breathing. He’s never bought into the cliché that another person could be half of his soul—Adam Parrish is always and forever his own man—but he likes the idea that maybe they’re some sort of binary system instead, each a separate entity that nonetheless would be fundamentally changed by the removal of the other.

The other star in that binary system is currently lying facedown on one of the couches at the Barns, his shirt stripped and his elaborate knot of a back tattoo significantly more colorful than when Adam last saw it. Opal, who should really be asleep at this time of night, is crouched on the floor next to Ronan’s waist, a prodigious rainbow of Crayola markers scattered around her and across the couch. Furrowing her brow and sticking her tongue out in concentration, she carefully shades each petal of one of Ronan’s tattooed flowers a slightly different shade of blue. Chainsaw watches from the arm of the couch with her head cocked, occasionally dipping down to clack her beak against some of the closer markers. Adam lowers his backpack to the floor and takes a moment to absorb the scene before speaking.

“So… new art project?” he hazards.

Ronan looks up, carefully keeping everything below his neck as still as possible so as not to jostle Opal’s hand. “I made the mistake of falling asleep like this, and she took advantage,” he says. Despite his grimace, he doesn’t seem at all bothered by the situation, and Adam decides the expression probably has more to do with the discomfort of attempting to bend his neck 180 degrees backwards to look at Adam’s face.

“It looks good,” Adam assures them both. He crouches beside Opal so that Ronan can turn his head to the side instead of craning to look at him straight on.

“Maybe I’ll just wander around shirtless until this stuff washes off, then,” Ronan says.

“I certainly wouldn’t complain.”

Ronan arches a devilish eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you were such a lech, Parrish,” he says, the hint of a tease dancing in his voice and the beginning of a smirk dancing at his mouth.

“You’d be surprised,” Adam says. He grins and kisses Ronan just a bit harder than necessary.

He breaks away when something plastic hits his cheek. “Opal, don’t throw markers,” he says, opening his eyes to attempt to give her a stern look. Opal sticks her tongue out at him. “Ronan, control your child,” Adam complains.

“Why is it that when she’s behaving well she’s _our_ child, but when she’s throwing markers and eating sticks she’s _my_ child?” Ronan asks.

“Because you’re the one she gets that shit from?”

In lieu of a retort, Ronan sighs and pushes himself up and off the couch, markers rolling from his back and bouncing to the floor as he moves. He scoops Opal up into his arms, as he often does when he’s decided it’s time for her to go to bed and doesn’t feel like spending half an hour trying to convince her to go voluntarily, and glances back down at Adam and Chainsaw.

“I love you,” he says in a general sort of way. It’s clearly just as much directed at the girl nestled against him as it is towards the boy he’s looking at.

“I love you too,” Adam and Opal reply, not quite in unison. Adam’s _I love you too_ is clear, warm, and immediate, an easy reflex born of months of repetition, while Opal’s is preceded by a pause and mumbled shyly into Ronan’s shoulder. Even after so long out of Ronan’s head, she’s still not totally certain of how her new position in the Lynch family works, but she’s less of the frightened wild animal she used to be.

Adam used to think family could never be anything but a source of horror for him—that his parents had broken him too badly to love and be loved in return. Even after he’d found his place in Gansey’s kingdom, he’d always assumed his plans for his future would carry him away too permanently for him to build any sort of family out of his friends in Henrietta. Yet he’s somehow found himself with a boyfriend and a daughter, and although Adam’s psychic abilities have waned to nearly nothing in Cabeswater’s absence, he doesn’t need magic to see his future unfold ahead of him and know that this will always be part of it. He’s as certain of Ronan and Opal’s permanence as he is of the fact that the autumn will come to carry him away to college and the winter will come to carry him back.

Ronan is still a force of nature, but Adam has no idea where anyone got the idea that forces of nature have to be violent things. Nowadays, Ronan is something slower and more permanent—the cycle of seasons, the hundred-year growth of trees, the perpetual collapse and rebirth of rainclouds. For Adam, who spent so long bracing himself to be alone, the knowledge of Ronan as a constant feels precisely like a full breath of air after years of struggling to breathe. _Forever_ isn’t so much a concept as it is an oxygen high.

When Ronan returns from putting Opal to bed, Adam greets him with an uncharacteristically giddy grin and another, slower kiss. The future looms large and thrilling and bright before him, but for now, the most exciting thing in his life is a quiet kiss in a quiet living room, and a murmured “ _I love you_ ” with eyes closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ronan letting small children color his tattoo is pretty much my favorite weirdly specific Raven Cycle fandom trope of all time. Really, though, Ronan shouldn't have fallen asleep in the first place. Farm animals are not babysitters.
> 
> There's something about writing Ronan and Adam interacting that really demands the use of multiple extended metaphors and powerful gazes, even when you're just trying to write family fluff. I mean, calm down, boys. Please just be normal teenagers for 5 minutes.
> 
> Anyways, as always, thank you to people who have been commenting and leaving kudos! You make my day and validate my need for strangers' approval.


	8. November 7th

“You,” Ronan says, eyes blazing, “fucking _idiot_.”

Gansey does not make eye contact, picking at a scratch gouged into the arm of the leather sofa. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he says quietly.

“ _How?_ ” Ronan demands. His arms are crossed scathingly as he paces back and forth in front of Gansey, feeling bizarrely like a disappointed parent. Every word caustic enough to blister steel, he continues, “How could you possibly think _bribing the fucking headmaster_ to get me a diploma—which I don’t even want, by the way—was in any way, shape, or form a good idea? And with our fucking _apartment?_ Where were you planning for us to _live_ after graduation?” He emphasizes the point by gesturing in a tight half-circle at the open space of the warehouse.

Gansey blinks remorsefully up at him. “I had thought you could move into the Barns,” he says. “And I did not expect to live long enough for it to matter.”

There are a thousand things Ronan could say right now— _I can’t live at the Barns until Matthew’s eighteen, dipshit_ or _spare me the self-sacrificing martyr bull_ or anything else cruel and unproductive and tempting—but instead, he looks at his friend, and all he sees is his broken body lying by the side of the road only a few nights earlier. Ronan’s lived with death a long time, but Gansey’s lived with it longer, and Ronan knows he’d have made far worse mistakes had he been in Gansey’s position.

He sighs. Empathy isn’t Ronan’s strong suit, least of all when he’s still riding the aftershocks of his mother’s death, but for the moment, he allows it to overtake him, redirecting his urge to fight towards a different target. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Helen’s meeting with Child later today to convince him to go back on the deal and shred the evidence,” Gansey says.

“I want to go with.”

Gansey frowns. “Are you sure that’s the best idea?”

Ronan isn’t, but he repeats, “I want to go with.”

Gansey texts Helen, who comes by to pick Ronan up within an hour, nodding politely to him from the driver’s seat of her silver Audi. Ronan and Helen have never particularly liked one another, but they’ve agreed to a temporary ceasefire, enemies united in a common front.

When they arrive, the Aglionby secretary is supremely unhappy to find Ronan Lynch in her lobby after school hours. Helen needs to wheedle her for several minutes before she begrudgingly calls Headmaster Child to inform him that his appointment has arrived. Child welcomes them into his office with a friendly greeting, but it ices over halfway through as he realizes what Helen and Ronan’s shared presence in his office must mean.

“So,” Child says, neatly lining up a set of pens on his blotter, “I assume this is about young Mr. Gansey’s warehouse, then.”

“You assume correctly,” says Helen.

Child remains coolly polite. With a thin smile, he says, “I assure you, I have no intention of allowing this to become public knowledge. This would reflect just as badly on me as it would on your family.”

Ronan’s eyes narrow disgustedly. “We don’t give a shit about how it _looks_ ,” he sneers.

“Well—” Helen starts to disagree.

Ronan ignores her and continues, “We’re here to get Monmouth back.”

Child’s eyebrows knit together, drawing more lines in an already thoroughly weathered face. “You realize, Mr. Lynch,” he says, voice teetering between surprise and condescension, “that without this contract, you will no longer be guaranteed a diploma at the end of this school year?” The implication of his question— _and I don’t think you have the grades to earn one on your own merit_ —goes unspoken but understood.

Ronan shrugs, utterly unaffected, and says, “So what? I wanna drop out anyways.”

Now the atmosphere in the room is truly mystified. Even Helen raises one flawless eyebrow in surprise, and Child visibly struggles with Ronan’s pronouncement for a moment before replying, “Mr. Lynch, you do realize that an Aglionby education is the sort of advantage of which most people can never even dream, correct? Why, your friend Adam Parrish—”

 _Boyfriend_ , Ronan mentally corrects him, but only presses his mouth into a thin line instead of saying it aloud. His half-week-old relationship, much as he’s proud of it, is not the focus of this meeting.

“—has struggled greatly to attain what you take for granted, and many more prospective students will never even get his opportunity,” Child continues unaware. “I understand that you are going through extraordinarily difficult personal circumstances, but—”

And with that, Ronan’s blood boils. “Don’t you fucking _dare_ bring my mother into this,” he interrupts. “She has nothing to do with the fact that no one has been able to give me a halfway decent answer to the question: Why the fuck would I want a diploma from here? What possible good could that do me?”

Helen shoots Ronan a glare and tries a more tactful approach. “What Mr. Lynch means, Headmaster Child, is that perhaps both you and my brother were rather misled about the value of the items with which you negotiated,” she says smoothly.

“Is that so, Ms. Gansey?” Child asks with a raised eyebrow. “Because I was under the impression that I would be obtaining an entire city block of valuable real estate in exchange for a piece of very impressive paper—albeit one that Mr. Lynch here does not seem to award any merit to,” he adds with a matching glare at Ronan.

If Helen is frustrated, she isn’t at all letting it show. “But you must admit, sir, that he has a point. What value is there in a degree awarded to someone who has no use or desire for it?” she points out.

“According to your brother, Ms. Gansey, an entire warehouse’s worth.”

Once, on a night when they were both plagued by particularly bad insomnia, Gansey had made Ronan watch a nature documentary with him on giant cats. Ronan remembers very little of it, but he can still recall with absolute clarity what a tigress looked like just before making a kill—still, poised, graceful, yet relaxed, aware that she was the most powerful creature in that and any other situation.

That is precisely what Helen Gansey looks like right now.

Helen pauses for just a fraction of a second, then smirks. “Oh yes,” she says, “that warehouse’s worth. You think this was a bargain, don’t you? You think you’ve obtained—how did you put it? An entire city block of valuable real estate? Let me warn you that what you’ve obtained, sir, is hundreds of thousands of dollars of safety inspection fees, historical evaluation fees, demolition and remodel costs, property taxes, et cetera. It’s an old building, Mr. Child, and not a particularly well-maintained one. Your best hope for a profit would be to sell the place, but with an under-the-table deal like this, you’re going to want to sit on the property for at least five years before you risk drawing any attention to yourself, and who knows what the market will look like then? Oh, but I don’t have to tell you this. You have experience with these shady sorts of arrangements, don’t you, headmaster? I mean, my God, that waterfront property on the Chesapeake Bay—what was it, ten years between those AP tests and actual monetary payout for you? And at least cheating on tests has value, unlike a high school diploma with Ronan Lynch’s name on it.”

Child’s browned cowboy face has gone deathly white. “Ms. Gansey—” he warns. He’s trying to sound dangerous, but his voice quakes.

Helen waves him off as airily as if she were simply making polite small talk at one of her mother’s garden parties. “Yes, five years for Monmouth Manufacturing sounds about right. In the meantime, you’ll still be paying taxes and upkeep on a falling-apart warehouse that’s bringing nothing to your life, and for what? So my brother’s roommate can get a degree he doesn’t want while you twiddle your thumbs and hope the economy stays strong? Sir, I have no illusions about power. In any institution, I know that the figure at the top will be corrupted to some degree. But this is not merely a failure of _morals_ , it is a failure of _common sense_ , and quite frankly, that is the one value that my family will be most disappointed to learn is not present at Aglionby Academy. I’d daresay we’d even be disappointed enough to halt all pending and future donations.” With this delicately constructed glove of logic and threat tossed onto Child’s desk, Helen sits back in her chair and crosses her legs with a silken rasp, looking every bit as dangerously clever as her brother.

Child sighs and rubs his forehead, seeming thoroughly mangled by Helen’s speech. “Very well,” he says defeatedly. “I’ll return the property to your brother. I’ll even shred the contract.”

Helen stands and does not offer him thanks. She is a haughty, immaculate queen in a castle of negotiation, and Ronan recognizes that without her, he would have been lost wandering the labyrinthine halls. “I will hold you to it, Headmaster Child,” says Helen Gansey.

Ronan is awed enough that he doesn’t even speak until they’ve left the school entirely. “Holy shit,” he finally manages. “That was fucking _awesome_.”

“You’re welcome,” Helen responds, swinging open her car door and sliding elegantly behind the wheel. “But if any of you ever let Dick pull something as stupid as that again, don’t expect me to bail you out.” Ronan nods obediently. He may not be attracted to her, but he certainly understands why Adam finds her so impressive now.

In the car, Ronan texts Gansey. _Congratulations, we’re no longer soon to be homeless._

Gansey types back, _Thanks. And I’m sorry._

 _Thank your sister. And it’s okay._ Ronan thinks for a moment, then adds, _And I’m dropping out._

Gansey texts, _Okay._

Ronan frowns. _That’s it? Don’t need to fetch the smelling salts or whatever?_

 _You were right. You don’t need Aglionby._ Before Ronan can reply, Gansey sends a second text. _And I’m not going to force you to stay somewhere you hate. Your talents are wasted on that school._

Ronan tries to think of something snide and juvenile to say, and comes up short. He leaves the message unanswered and turns his gaze out the window of the car. The wrought iron Aglionby gates are just barely visible in the side mirror, and as they slide from sight, he feels something in his chest cut its tether and fall away. It’s not until now, when he finally feels its absence, that he realizes how badly the weight of obligation—to school, to his family’s wishes, to Gansey’s expectations—has been crushing him.

He’s a high school dropout. His parents are dead. He’s a teenage dad who will never live more than a few miles outside of his hometown.

He’s never felt so free in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, as a former chemistry major, I feel obligated to inform you all that the phrase "caustic enough to blister steel" isn't really scientifically accurate. However, I kept it in because it was emotionally true and sounded Ronan-like. According to Adam, Ronan can intimidate science into doing whatever he wants.
> 
> This one's actually been sitting around, partially finished, for a while. It took longer to write than the other chapters because it actually has something almost resembling a plot.
> 
> I was just looking at the tags for this fic and realized I marked it as multi-ship, yet we're 8 installments in and the only couple that's gotten significant attention is Adam and Ronan. I have a nugget of a Bluesey installment in progress, but I have yet to develop it into a full chapter. Whatever, at least there are lots of friendships getting attention, right?


	9. March 19th

They’re wandering Henrietta aimlessly in the Pig, no particular plan in place for the afternoon except to enjoy it, when Blue proposes the trip.

“I was thinking we should do a road trip after graduation,” she says. She’s installed in the back seat of the Camaro, wedged between Henry and the driver’s side of the car, leaning forward so that her face is just inches behind Gansey’s neck. The sunny scent of her shampoo trickles over him, and he shakes his head slightly to get his mind back on the road.

“Like Venezuela!” Henry chimes in agreeably. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Gansey sees Adam mouth, _Venezuela?_ to no one in particular. From his throne in the passenger seat, Ronan raises a bemused eyebrow.

Blue doesn’t bother filling either of them in, and instead points triumphantly at Henry. “Yes! Except not actually Venezuela. I was thinking continental U.S., you know, great American road trip or whatever.”

“Ah, see the country from sea to shining sea?” Henry asks. “Amber waves of genetically identical, legally copyrighted corn?”

“And purple mountains’ majesty,” Blue agrees. “So, what do the rest of you think?”

“I’m game,” Gansey says. “Does anyone know where we can obtain a poodle named Charley?”

“Oh, _Gansey_ ,” Adam says despairingly.

Gansey laughs, both at Adam’s disgust and the others’ vague confusion. “It was either a Steinbeck joke or a Kerouac one. I felt the Steinbeck joke was slightly less atrocious,” he explains.

“Okay, Gansey’s officially uninvited from the road trip,” Blue announces. “What about you, Ronan? You interested?”

“What, slumming it in fucking RV campgrounds and shit so we can see the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine? Hard pass,” Ronan says, twisting to look at her as he does so. Blue flips him off, and he grins. “Also,” he adds more seriously, “I’m not gonna send Opal to live with my brothers for months on end, and I’m definitely not dragging her around the country with us.” Gansey, recalling Opal’s valiant effort to kick a hole through the floor of the Pig on the one and only occasion they had made her ride in the car for more than two hours straight, shudders in agreement and makes a mental note to thank Blue’s family yet again for giving them all this afternoon off.

Or—not _them all_. Adam and Ronan. He still forgets, sometimes, that they’re looking after themselves and each other now, that he no longer needs to serve as their mature, responsible leader. It’s simultaneously an enormous relief and a deeply unsettling role reversal to realize that his friends are, in a very real way, growing up faster than him.

Blue turns towards Adam. They all know his participation is a long shot, and an even longer one with Ronan not going, but Blue still tries: “Adam? What about you?”

He shakes his head, just once. “No, I’m gonna work this summer.”

“We are disappointed but not surprised,” Henry assures him.

Blue hums agreeably. “Well, looks like it’s just you and me, Henry—and Gansey, if he promises not to make any more awful American literature jokes.” She says the word _jokes_ with more sarcasm than should be possible for a person so small to contain. “I’ve been doing some research, and I think the cost should actually be okay, but I’m concerned about the environmental—dog!” Blue interrupts herself, pointing to an extraordinarily chubby golden retriever walking with its owner on the upcoming block. Both Ronan and Adam turn their heads to look.

“Nice,” Gansey responds automatically. He’s learned that this precise reply is the easiest way to bring a conversation back on track after a dog sighting; anything more will lead to everyone getting distracted, while anything less means Blue and Ronan will spend the rest of the ride demanding to know why he ignored the dog. “So, what were you saying about the environment?”

“Oh, right. Well, it’d be a lot of driving, and both this car and the Suburban are hardly eco-friendly. Besides, the Pig breaks down… about how often would you say, Gansey?”

“On average? Probably every seven hundred miles. We could take Henry’s car,” Gansey suggests unwillingly, more because it needs to be said than because he wants to take Henry’s monstrous Fisker anywhere but the nearest landfill.

In the rearview, he sees Henry grimace. “Charging stations and repairs for electric cars aren’t ubiquitous enough to take my craft into uncharted waters,” he says. “Here be dragons, and they have nothing but a gasoline pump and parts ripped off a V8 engine.”

Blue leans across Henry and whispers to Adam, “Those are real car references, right?”

“Yes, but I’m pretty sure he got them from _Mad Max_ movies and not any actual study of cars,” Adam replies.

“Rude,” Henry says. “Accurate, but rude.”

“One day,” Gansey muses, “I’d like to try to quantify exactly how much of your worldly knowledge comes from the music and film catalogues of the 1980s.”

“Entirely too much. Blame SickSteve, he’s the movie man.”

Ronan asks, “He also the one who got you that godawful Madonna t-shirt?”

“No,” Henry replies, “Madonna being a _goddamned icon_ got me that t-shirt.”

“If we’re going to start insulting each other’s clothes, I have some more complaints about Gansey’s shoes,” Blue announces.

Gansey groans and rests his forehead against the steering wheel. It’s still too close to winter for wildness, yet right now, he feels young as summer. He’s been an old man for as long as he can remember, a gift of both Cabeswater’s influence and his natural personality, but lately, youth has been fitting more comfortably on his shoulders. As the traffic light changes to green and the Camaro heaves forward, he lets the sensation of being young and improbably alive, present in this moment and no other, thrill within him.

He can barely breathe through all the light in his chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something this short (and aimless and non-cohesive) really should not have taken as long to finish/edit/post as it did, but I had to deal with work and school and socializing and overwhelming attacks of doubt about my writing ability, so here we are.
> 
> I've never actually read _Travels with Charley in Search of America_ , but I'm 100% certain that Gansey has. I'm also 100% certain that Blue is totally that friend who will interrupt or pause any conversation to point out a dog. I am willing to defend these facts with my life.
> 
> Everyone who's been commenting and/or leaving kudos is wonderful and amazing!


	10. November 3rd

The ride back to 300 Fox Way after Gansey gasps his way back to life is curiously subdued. Their collective joy at his return is tempered by a fierce and cavernous grief—for Cabeswater, for Aurora, for so much of the magic of their lives—that snuffs out any attempts at conversation or celebration. Tiny tendrils of speech occasionally furl out into the car, roots probing for a hold, but they all swiftly wither and die. In the middle of the BMW’s backseat, Gansey curls his body towards Blue, their fingers laced together on the leather between them. Orphan Girl sits to his right, watching the headlights of Henry’s Fisker reflect off the raindrops beading on her window.

Finally, Gansey’s eyebrows draw together purposefully, and he sits up straight. Looking between Ronan and Adam in the front seat, he asks, “So, I suspect I already know the answer, but is everything okay between you two?”

Ronan hates how unreasonably normal Gansey’s voice sounds right now. It reminds him too much of how he had walked away from them at the rest stop, doing everything in his power to keep his tears hidden even from his friends. He should be screaming, or weeping, or glowing with triumph, or feeling _something_. He shouldn’t just sound like he’s asking if they got their Calculus homework done, like this is any other normal Monday evening.

Adam apparently agrees, twisting in the passenger seat to reply, “Jesus Christ, really, Gansey? Everything that just happened, and _that’s_ what you want to talk about?” His voice is slightly strained, annoyance or anxiety or both pulling his words taut.

“Everything that just happened either I already understand, or will require significantly more thought than I can devote to it in the time it takes to drive back to Blue’s house,” Gansey says calmly. “In the meantime, I am concerned for my friends and their feelings, so yes, actually, that is what I want to talk about.”

Adam knocks his head gently against the headrest with a tired sigh. Ronan flashes a glance at Gansey in the rearview mirror and says, “And what ‘that’ are you referring to, exactly?” He takes care to say it like a challenge; he’s guessing that Adam told Gansey about them (are they a _them_?), and he wants them both to know that he’s guessed and is waiting to see if they’ll actually admit to it.

Gansey looks uncertainly at Adam, who waves a vague hand to give him the go-ahead. “Adam told me that you guys kissed,” he admits. Blue’s eyebrows shoot up near her hairline, but she says nothing. Gansey continues, “That was Friday night. As we left things, Adam still had not come to a plan of action, and there was hardly an appropriate moment to bring it up again between then and now. So I repeat: is everything okay between you two?”

There’s a moment where neither of them speak, just look at each other and silently contemplate how to answer. Words are unnecessary when they mean the same thing: _I’m okay if you’re okay._ After a beat, Ronan shifts his gaze back to the road, and Adam’s eyes return to Gansey. “Everything’s fine,” Adam says, a bit tersely.

“Fine how?”

Adam’s lips briefly purse, a flash of annoyance animating his face. “Fine like it’s been an entire weekend of death and possession and blood and missing time and _we haven’t had time to talk about labels yet,_ ” he snaps, his earlier tension now in full force, stringing through his words like razor wire. “We’re—I don’t know, together? Dating? I don’t _know_ , Gansey! All I know is that it feels like one minute we were making out, and the next minute we were here and people were dead.”

Now Ronan recognizes the agitation in Adam’s voice: not anger, but stress bordering on hysteria. Orphan Girl reaches forward and lays a comforting hand on Adam’s arm. Adam closes his eyes and breathes out through his nose. “Sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have snapped. I know you mean well.”

“I’m sorry, too. I didn’t intend to push you beyond what you were comfortable discussing,” Gansey replies.

“It's okay.” Adam reaches up to press his own fingers lightly against Orphan Girl’s where they rest against his arm. “I’m not uncomfortable, it's just that it's another thing we need to talk about in a day full of things we need to talk about, and I’m getting overwhelmed.”

“I’ll make you some tea when we get back to my house,” Blue offers.

“That,” Adam says, “would probably just make everything much worse.”

Blue laughs. It’s the first any of them have genuinely laughed in days, and even she seems startled by it. With a faint smile, she looks between Orphan Girl and the three boys, then says, “For the record, Adam, I think you could do so much better than Ronan.”

“Hey, fuck you, Sargent, I’m a catch!” Ronan protests, catching her gaze in the rearview mirror. Blue laughs again, and this time, Adam joins her. The pensive mood in the car eases.

When they reach 300 Fox Way, the late afternoon becomes a flurried evening of Calla furiously demanding answers—“You were gone for more than a _day!_ ” she spits repeatedly and to anyone who will listen—and Gwenllian singing insults from the kitchen and wounds being dressed and blood being scrubbed from clothes and skin and Maura trying to keep everyone reasonably calm and sane through the entirety of the above list. The worst moment comes when Calla tells them that Noah disappeared that afternoon—from the sound of it, at the same time Gansey had died—and she doesn't think he's coming back. Adam, ever the logician, asks how she can be sure, and Maura sadly says that his energy has vanished entirely, and none of the three psychics remaining in the house have found any trace of it in all the reaches of their various supernatural senses.

“But how is that different from all the other times Noah’s vanished?” This is Gansey, Ronan thinks, or possibly it's Blue. He doesn't care who's saying what right now; he trusts Maura and Calla enough to believe them when they say he's lost yet another person he loves.

“His energy was never completely gone before. Even at his weakest, we could still feel him there if we looked,” Maura explains. “But now… he didn't just disappear. He _left_.”

Ronan drops his head back to stare at the ceiling, grief buzzing in his throat. When he’d found out Noah was dead, he had locked himself in his room, drowning his heart in music and alcohol. He doesn't know what to do with the fact of Noah being gone entirely. He doesn't get a chance to figure it out, as Gwenllian shrieks some offensive rhyme from the doorway and Blue despondently begs her mother to make her _stop_ and Gansey finds a spot of dried blood on his shoulder that he had failed to wash off earlier and the house descends into chaos once again.

The gray day has deepened to wet, pitch-black night by the time Ronan has a chance to slip out to the front steps unaccompanied. He takes a moment to appreciate the fact that, for the second time in only a handful of days, he’s going to willingly call someone on his phone, and then, heart sickeningly heavy in his chest, he dials Declan.

Declan picks up immediately. “Ronan, thank God,” he says, which is not a phrase Ronan had ever thought he’d hear from his older brother’s mouth.

Ronan squeezes his eyes shut. “Is Matthew okay?” he asks, his mouth sandy with terror, praying with everything in his barely-regrown soul that the answer is yes.

“He is now. For a while, though, he—God, he was just _blank_ , no expression at all. No movement. Like there was nothing inside him. And then this black shit started dribbling from his ears, so I called you, but—look, just what the hell happened?”

Ronan draws in a long, shuddering breath and lets it out slowly. Disjointedly, trying to put the pieces in the right order even though he’s not sure himself what that is, he says, “The demon. The one all those collectors were here for. It tried to kill me. We managed to kill it first, but…” Pause. Breathe. Brace for impact. God, he doesn’t want to say it.

“Declan, Mom’s dead.” When Declan doesn't respond, Ronan adds, “The demon was destroying all the dream magic, and she—”

“When?” Declan interrupts. His voice is quiet and controlled, but Ronan knows better now than to mistake his calm for a lack of emotion. Declan does not grieve in front of other people, preferring to keep his true feelings in a cage until they can be safely examined in private. Once again, Ronan is reminded of Gansey hiding by the tables at the rest stop, curling on the ground to cry out of sight.

Remembering Declan’s question, Ronan struggles to explain how time passed differently for him this weekend. “Parrish and Orphan Girl and I found her on Saturday morning. But there was all this other shit going on with Gansey, and we were all just trying not to get killed too, and time wasn't even fucking _working_ right, and—” He cuts himself off, recognizing the familiar rhythm of panic starting to creep into his words. Using the hand not holding the phone, he digs his nails into the skin of his forearm, waiting for Declan to berate him, to say _and you didn't have two fucking minutes to tell me before now?_ , to blame Adam or Gansey for not taking charge of Ronan.

Declan says, “Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”

“That's it?” Ronan asks, a little startled.

“I don't see what else there is to say.” Declan thinks a moment, then adds, “I’ll tell Matthew and figure out where to go from there. We can talk more tomorrow.” There's a certain clinical comfort to his words, a feeling of normalcy. It's impossible to forget, listening to him, that this is not the end of the world.

“Okay.” Ronan sags a little in relief. His peace with Declan is still tenuous, and he's not yet sure he won't end up wrecking things between them again. If this wasn't enough to break it, though, he can allow himself some hope that they've made a permanent repair.

“Get some sleep, Ronan.”

When he hangs up, Ronan realizes that Adam is sitting beside him. He’s not sure how long he’s been there, but he doesn’t care. There’s nothing in his life that Adam is not allowed to share in, even this, as long as Adam wants it.

_I’ll be here as long as you want me. As long as you want to come back to me._

Ronan says, “I don’t want to talk.”

Adam replies, “The fuck would I talk about?”

Both of their mouths quirk in an unfunny way at this, Ronan’s words from Adam’s mouth. The last time they’d sat on these steps together, Adam had been the bereaved and Ronan the wary comfort. This time, though, the difference goes beyond their role reversal. This time, Ronan is allowed to rest his head miserably against Adam’s shoulder, unencumbered by the need to posture. This time, Adam is allowed to press his cheek to the top of Ronan’s head and wrap an arm around him, warmth seeping into his chilled back. This time, Orphan Girl is there to creep out of the house in a pair of Blue’s old rain boots and press herself comfortingly against Ronan’s other side, sympathy and adoration both present and uncomplicated on her childish face.

The three of them remain there on the steps for easily fifteen minutes, no one speaking, all of them just doing their best to hold on to each other in the dark of the rain-soaked night. Reflections of streetlights shiver on the pavement, continuously broken by raindrops, and Ronan watches them with a devout focus. He wonders if this is what Adam feels when he scries: the world gradually quieting down around him.

His contemplation is broken when he feels a trembling sensation against his side and realizes it’s coming from Orphan Girl. Eyebrows drawn with concern, he looks down at her and asks, voice rusty, “Are you cold?”

She juts her chin defiantly. “ _Non sum frigus_.”

But Ronan knows she has all his stubbornness and then some, so he says, “Yes, you are, and I am, too. Come on, we’re going inside.” He pushes himself to his feet, muscles chilled and stiff, and she hops up after him, carefully bracing her boots on the wet ground. Ronan extends a hand to help Adam up, which Adam accepts. They head as a unit into the house, where they’re greeted by Blue as she hauls a massive bundle of blankets and pillows down the stairs.

“Is Matthew okay?” she asks, her voice low and apprehensive. Ronan nods. Blue sighs with relief, and says more normally, “Well, thank goodness for that, at least.” She makes no effort at awkward sympathy, no _how did it go?_ — _I had to fucking tell my brother that our mom was dead, it was better than Disneyland_ —and in that moment, Ronan burns with gratitude for her friendship and its hands-off approach to grief. “Gansey and Henry and I are all going to sleep in the living room tonight. You guys should join us, spare yourselves the drive,” Blue adds.

In truth, it’s really no effort to drive to St. Agnes or Monmouth Manufacturing from here, especially at this time of night. But none of them want to be apart from their friends just now, and so they agree to spend the night on the floor of 300 Fox Way. Blue tells them to go help Gansey and Henry move the furniture to clear a space in the middle of the room while she tries to drag her bundle the rest of the way without half the pillows falling out. It takes about ten minutes of jostling and strategizing and reorganizing, but they finally manage to settle all six of their bodies into the space afforded by the small living room floor.

It doesn’t really make anything better. Having his friends nearby does nothing to dim Ronan’s awareness of the fact that his mother is dead, that they all could have died as well, that Cabeswater is gone, that Noah is never coming back. Still, as Orphan Girl snuffles in the darkness next to him, as Gansey and Blue and Henry shift against their pillows, as Adam’s unaware hand grazes against Ronan’s chest, he feels something lighten inside him nonetheless—not a lessening of pain, but a strengthening of hope. It’s the same feeling he had when he spoke to Declan: the knowledge that, against all odds, life will go on.

He closes his eyes, and for once, he doesn’t dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See, here's the thing: when I posted the last update, I had another one most of the way done already. It's a happy little thing with lots of friendship and making fun of Aglionby boys, and I thought for sure, 100% for sure, that it would be chapter 10. Then, when I went to finish it, this idea grabbed me and choke-slammed me into a wall and demanded I write it instead, even though I had no idea where it was going so it ended up taking 2500 words and nearly a week to finish. So really, I'm not any happier with this unexpected angst than you are.
> 
> According to the internet, "non sum frigus" is Latin for "I'm not cold." According to everything I know about Latin, it probably means something totally different, is being used in the wrong context, and isn't even grammatically correct. If this is the case, please just blame it on Ronan's shitty Latin.
> 
> For the record, this isn't at all intended to be a complete picture of everything that happens at Fox Way that night, but just a portrait of what's going on in Ronan's head—namely, a lot of vague, blurry, distracted feelings punctuated by brief moments of focus.


	11. February 2nd

_Four more months. Four more months. Four more months._

If Adam were being accurate, it would be more like _four and a half months_ , Aglionby’s graduation falling as it does in mid-to-late June, but just _four_ makes for a much catchier mantra. He wonders if that’s some form of irony—he’s spent so long working himself to the bone to cling to this school, and now he can’t wait to escape—but his mind is still too sluggish from last night’s shift at the warehouse to decide. Lately, his life seems like an endless series of countdowns: four months until graduation. Two months until Ivy League decisions are released. Eight hours until he has to be at work. Four hours until the end of the school day. God knows how long until he can get a full night’s sleep.

He’s sitting drowsily at his desk, waiting for fourth period English to start, when Henry slides unexpectedly into the seat next to him. It’s not that Henry’s new to the class, but he usually sits in the desk directly under the antique window overlooking the school courtyard, and even Adam, detached from the social currents of Aglionby as he is, knows that seat changes this late in the school year are seen as a crime on par with actual property theft.

Adam glances sideways at Henry, searching for any explanation as to his presence, but Henry seems content to merely flick through his phone until Adam interrupts, “What are you doing here, Cheng?”

Henry looks bemused. “I… I’m in this class, Parrish,” he says. “You knew that, right?”

“I mean, what are you doing in Carruthers’ seat?” Adam clarifies.

“Oh!” Henry’s face brightens considerably. “I’d noticed you’d seemed especially irritated by him yesterday, and he seemed especially clueless about it, so I thought to myself, ‘Henry, just take pity on the both of them and put them out of their misery.’ So here I am. Besides, it’s nice to sit next to friends in class, don’t you think?”

Adam shrugs. In truth, it doesn’t really make a difference to him who he sits with, as his attention is perpetually and exclusively trained on taking notes, answering questions, and trying to keep his right ear angled towards whoever’s speaking. Even on the rare occasions that Ronan, who used to occupy the desk in front of him, had shown up to class, he hadn’t made much of a difference in Adam’s learning experience; the most distraction Adam had allowed himself was a few glances at the hooks of Ronan’s tattoo where it crept above his collar and onto his neck.

He wonders if the fact that he’s now well-acquainted with the sight of the tattoo in full would make those glimpses less diverting or more.

“Yo, Parrish.” Bryce Johanssen swings sideways into the empty seat that used to be Ronan’s and drums his fingers on the back of the chair. Adam has never been fond of Bryce, a wiry, nervy guy who seems perpetually tweaked and about two seconds from jumping out a window, but Bryce, blissfully oblivious to Adam’s disdain, continues, “A buddy of mine said he saw you and Lynch getting cozy at Nino’s the other night.”

Adam waits for him to elaborate, but his conversational partner seems to think he's done his job sufficiently already. “What’s your question?” Adam prompts.

“My question is what the fuck, man?” Bryce says.

“You mean is it true?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

Bryce’s mouth opens and closes a few times as he processes this information. “Why?”

Adam gives him a look that he hopes manages to telegraph that he thinks Bryce was dropped on his head as a baby, possibly from a great height. “Well,” Adam says with slow, withering condescension, “that would be because we’re _dating_ , Bryce. It's something that people do when they're attracted to each other and enjoy spending time together.”

It’s a very Ronan response, far more caustic and offensive than Adam would normally have opted for, but his strained patience for Aglionby has abruptly reached its end. He’s tired of the cliques, the showboating, the casual homophobia, the pervasive culture of arrogance and self-absorption.

Bryce raises his hands in a show of submission. “Okay, Jesus, man,” he says. “Don’t have to be so fucking rude. It was just a question.”

But it wasn’t. It never is “just a question” with Aglionby boys. Adam has spent almost three years exhaustedly fielding “just questions” rooted in their assumptions about his family, his scholarship, his sexuality, his life, and he knows by now that he has to shut down the questioning before it starts, because it’s always the boys he most dislikes who keep pushing.

Henry smirks proudly, evidently pleased that someone besides him is expressing disdain for Aglionby _at_ Aglionby, not just in private after-school conversation. “Goodbye, Johanssen,” he says, waving Bryce off easily towards the front of the room. After Bryce leaves, Henry turns to Adam with a raised eyebrow and an impressed expression. “I have to say, I did not think you would tell him that.”

Adam blinks. “What, that Ronan and I are dating?” he asks, surprised. “Did you think I would lie about that?”

“No, no, not _lie_ ,” says Henry. “I had just assumed you would give him the typical Parrish treatment, you know, coldly ignore him until he slinks off nursing his hurt feelings and questioning his self-worth.”

Adam stares blankly at him. He has no idea what Henry’s talking about; he’s always assumed the other Aglionby boys view his silence as mere social awkwardness, if they bother to consider it at all. “Is that a thing?” he asks.

Now it’s Henry’s turn to look at him like he’s suffering a head injury. “Um, _yeah_ , man. Do you know how many people at this school are convinced you hate them? I mean, to be fair, most of them deserve it, like our friend Johanssen and his clear ramp-up to a disgusting interrogation about your personal life, but sometimes you go all ice king on someone who was just being friendly.”

Adam frowns. He doesn’t have to speak for Henry to interpret the expression perfectly.

“Believe it or not, Parrish,” Henry says, more gently, “Gansey-Three and I are not the only ones here who see the appeal of friendship with a pretty-faced valedictorian with an interesting social circle and a more interesting relationship with the laws of physics re: roof tiles.”

“I…” Adam struggles to reshape his understanding of Aglionby to accommodate this new information. He knows he’s not the most friendly person, but he’d also been sure that none of the other Aglionby boys were actually interested in befriending him. He’s weathered so many awkward negotiations with his classmates that have left him feeling cheap and used, a source of entertainment, a poor kid who thinks he can be one of them, that somewhere along the way he stopped considering friendship with any of them as a possibility.

“Okay,” he finishes lamely. The thing is, it doesn't really make a difference at this point, when there’s less than a semester left before graduation and he's already found the sort of earth-moving friendship that Gansey and Blue and Henry offer. Even if the other boys do want to be friends with him, he's no longer interested in their casual companionship, knowing that it’ll come with all the awkward, frustrating navigations of his early friendship with Gansey— _things cost money, things cost time, things cost energy, and I don't have any of that to spare_ —and none of the rewards.

 _Do you know how many people at this school are convinced you hate them?_ They’re not entirely wrong. Raven boys are _tiring_ to talk to, their constant reminders that Adam is not one of them leaching the energy from his heart and mind until he is left drained and hollow, and he already has so little that he can’t help but resent them for their unintentional thievery. Gansey and Henry are great, of course, and the Vancouver crew is at least tolerable, but for the most part, Aglionby Academy students are a hateful, obnoxious school of piranhas that Adam doesn't care to risk being devoured by.

He doesn’t think he ever used to devote this much thought to all the whys and ways of his distaste for his classmates. He certainly doesn’t think he ever used to compare them to South American fish. He thinks he's been listening to Blue too much lately. She'll be pleased to hear that piranha comparison, though, and he makes a mental note to tell her about it this afternoon.

_Four more months. Four more months. Four more months._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up with Aglionby students is actually the most fun writing exercise ever. I really like a chance to write insufferably douchey characters, and giving them stock rich white boy names is just the icing on the cake.
> 
> Anyways, this really shouldn't have taken as long as it did, but I have had so many midterms and projects this week that my brain got too stuck to write or edit anything. This was a nasty, incoherent mess for a long time, but I finally managed to scrape it into something like the "Adam and Henry being bros and also hating Aglionby and also Adam is very proudly and openly dating Ronan and won't take anyone's shit about it" shape I wanted.
> 
> Kudos and comments are always much appreciated.


	12. November 13th

Ronan has never been comfortable with silence. He’s not comfortable with conversation, either, but silence has always had a special way of wriggling itself under his skin and crawling up the back of his neck. The inside of his head is such a loud place that he needs to drown it out with music or engines or other people, or else it will continue to reverberate until he breaks from the inside out.

Being at the Barns helps. Being with Adam helps. Both at the same time is best of all. It’s the only reason he can sit here on his childhood bed, Adam scratching quietly at some homework beside him, and not feel his body humming with nervous energy the way it usually does when he is awake and aimless. Instead, he watches Orphan Girl and Chainsaw sort through a pile of old socks Blue had generously offered them after noticing Orphan Girl’s fascination with a pair of star-patterned knee socks she wore the other day. Most of the socks are years old and have faded so badly their colors are barely recognizable, but Orphan Girl is happy to shred them into pieces, occasionally preserving one enough to pull it onto her leg or arm as a bizarre and mismatched fashion statement. Her ancient, otherworldly look is significantly hampered by the addition of legwarmers below her oversized sweater.

“You know,” Adam comments unexpectedly, “if she's going to be around permanently, she probably needs a real name.”

Ronan frowns, still thinking about socks. “I thought Blue was her real name.”

Adam rolls his eyes and lightly scuffs a hand across Ronan’s shaved head. “Not Blue,” he says exasperatedly. Ronan grins. “Orphan Girl. We can't just keep calling her that forever.”

Actually, Ronan hadn't considered this. He’s been calling her Orphan Girl for years, and it never occurred to him that she might like an actual name now that she's a real girl with a physical form and a penchant for eating sticks. He shrugs. “We can ask her about it. I mean, she's not a baby, she can have her own say in it.”

“Of course,” Adam agrees quickly.

At the moment, Orphan Girl seems entirely uninterested in their conversation, carefully using her sharp front teeth to rip additional holes in an already hole-filled sock. What little fabric remains is covered in faded blue and purple stripes.

“Hey, Orphan Girl,” Ronan calls out to her, drawing her attention with unusual gentleness. She looks up at him with part of the sock dangling from her mouth. He doesn't try to beckon her over, and she makes no move to leave her sock pile. Ronan’s bedroom here at the Barns is a much smaller thing than the one at Monmouth, and they don't need to close the gap between them to comfortably converse. “Do you want us to call you something other than that?”

She seems confused by the question, her fair eyebrows knitting together under the skullcap that she still insists on wearing. “ _Qualis est?_ ” she asks.

“Like a real name.”

Orphan Girl frowns and taps Chainsaw’s head with one gentle finger. Slowly, hesitantly, she nods.

Adam asks, “Do you have anything particular in mind?”

Frown deepening, Orphan Girl pushes to her feet and heads for Ronan’s dresser. She does this sometimes, answering questions with actions instead of words, and Ronan’s heart clenches with that particular affection that comes with shared behavior between family. Orphan Girl carefully brushes her hand along the top of the dresser, identifying each knickknack and figure by feeling them gently with her fingertips because she’s too short to actually see them, until she finds what she’s searching for and folds her hand cautiously around it. She retreats to where Ronan and Adam are sitting on the bed and turns her hand up to show them her find.

It’s a gemstone, polished into a smooth, flat oval shape almost as large as her palm. The color is hard to pin down, flashing from greenish black to milky white to a brilliant blue to an iridescent rainbow as she tips her hand back and forth, catching the soft light of Ronan’s lamp at different angles. It looks like the birth of a galaxy, a celestial fragment contained in her tiny hand. Ronan remembers dreaming it on an especially starry night only a few weeks before his father died, wishing he could distill all of the heavens into a single piece.

“What’s this called?” Orphan Girl asks. She’s still getting used to speaking English, preferring Latin when verbal communication is necessary at all.

“It’s an opal,” Ronan tells her.

Adam reaches out to touch it softly. He doesn’t say anything, and neither does Orphan Girl.

“That's it, then?” Ronan presses. Orphan Girl keeps her eyes fixed on the stone and nods. “Opal.” He rolls the name around in his mouth and finds he likes the weight of it on his tongue much better than _Orphan Girl_.

 _Besides_ , his traitor brain whispers with a glance at Adam, _it's not like that name is even accurate anymore._ Trying to keep his face from betraying him, Ronan sternly instructs his mind to leave Adam out of this. Ronan may basically be a father to Orphan Girl—Opal—but that doesn't mean Adam has to share that label, too.

“Opal,” Adam murmurs in agreement. He withdraws his hand from the gem, and Opal cracks a smile almost as brilliant as the stone in her hand. Their approval clearly means a great deal to her, and that feels like an unexpectedly weighty responsibility in this context. It feels like a reminder of his importance in her life, and hers in his. It feels like love, like a thrashing, clawing, desperate urge to always keep her this happy. It feels, if Ronan's being honest, a lot like how he remembers his family feeling before they were broken.

Opal returns to her sock pile with gem in hand. Adam returns to his homework. Silence reigns. Ronan doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not 100% satisfied with this, but it's been so long since the last update that I decided to just post it anyways. Updates will continue to be slow for a while because I'm closing in on the end of the school year and so 90% of my time is being spent writing papers, scrambling to save my grades, or at work.
> 
> Anyways, while I really love the theory that the name Opal is just Ronan subtracting a bunch of letters from "Orphan Girl", I also have a lot of feelings about opals (just, like, as gemstones) and about Opal expressing personhood by choosing her own name. I feel like opals look on the outside like Opal looks on the inside.
> 
> As always, kudos and comments give my entire life meaning!


	13. April 25th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy crap, it's been almost two weeks since the last update. I mean, I did warn you all, but still.

“It’s been a year since we first met,” Blue announces. Her hair and face are lit with a warm reddish hue from the sunset shining through the windows, and it makes her feel like the biggest thing in Monmouth Manufacturing right now.

“Aw,” Ronan says, “I didn’t get you an anniversary present.”

His flippancy rather loses its edge when Blue takes into account that he’s currently holding Opal in his lap and therefore looks about as adorable as is possible for him to look while still being Ronan Lynch. She doesn’t want him to know she thinks that, though, so she rolls her eyes and says, “I’ll try to manage my disappointment.”

“God, a _year_.” Gansey reflects. He stretches beside her on his bed, comfortable and languid. “I can't believe you actually made friends with us after that first impression I made.”

“Thank Adam, he's the one who lured me in by being all pretty and apologetic afterwards,” Blue says. She makes it sound light and joking, but she really is grateful that Adam talked to her that night. If he hadn't, she certainly never would have given him or any of the other boys another chance, and her life would have stayed exactly as it was before: filled with small dreams, friendships based on proximity rather than genuine interest, and a frustrating lack of magic.

The boy in question grins and ducks his head, flattered and embarrassed in equal measure. He’s curled next to Ronan on the couch, picking idly at a fray on his jeans just above the knee. “To be fair,” he argues, looking up modestly but keeping his fingers moving, “I wouldn’t have needed to apologize if Gansey hadn’t been an ass in the first place, so you could argue that he’s really the one responsible.”

“Just take the damn compliment, Adam,” Blue says sternly.

Adam huffs a quiet laugh. “Yes, ma’am.”

The sunset fades into dusk, and quiet settles into the warehouse. Gansey flips through an old issue of _National Geographic_. Blue makes an effort at homework that could be generously described as halfhearted. Opal retreats to her room—formerly Noah’s—with a pen and a thick pad of legal paper, intent on either drawing or practicing her penmanship, Blue’s not sure which. As soon as she's gone, Ronan and Adam quickly devolve into a messy, affectionate tangle, as they often do; Blue supposes they're trying to fit in as much contact as they can now that Adam is officially leaving for college in the fall. She knows they’re both creatures of touch, of physical expression—she remembers Adam holding her hand, tapping her wrist, lying in her lap, and she’s seen Ronan express love in a thousand little gestures but almost never in words—and pretty soon they will be spending eight months out of each year more than five hundred miles away from each other. That compressed timeline leaves them no room for embarrassment or unwanted distance.

It’s just the opposite for her and Gansey. Time is a luxury she had never thought they would have, but here they are, a gap year stretching before them and infinite possibility beyond it. The passionate late-night drives, the hungry not-kisses, the _we’re running out of time_ anxiety are long behind them; the urgency that used to hum through their relationship has quieted down into soft white noise, taking the desperation for contact with it. She still occasionally kisses him or hooks her legs over his lap when they’re sitting together, and he still holds her hand or touches her cheek absentmindedly, but for the most part, their relationship is contained to private moments, out of view of the rest of the world. It’s why it’s almost not a surprise when Ronan tells them, seemingly unprompted, that they “don’t act very couple-y”.

Gansey looks at him from under his magazine, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.

“I mean,” Ronan clarifies, “you guys are weirdly sterile together. It's like you're at a 1950s school dance and if you do more than hold hands you’ll get accused of communism.”

“That doesn't strike me as historically accurate,” Gansey observes.

“It one hundred percent is,” Ronan assures him.

Blue says, “We get up to the communism stuff when you guys aren't around. It's just less awkward that way.”

“I’m definitely not comfortable with conducting communist activity in front of other people,” Gansey agrees. His mouth betrays no hint of a smile, but the sparkle in his eyes gives away his amusement. Blue loves seeing him like this, easy and content, temporarily unburdened by both his past and his future.

“Clearly,” she adds, eyeing Adam and Ronan, “you two don’t have that problem.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ronan says calmly. This is an obvious joke, as Adam’s hand is presently under Ronan’s shirt and Adam’s mouth is presently under Ronan’s jaw.

Adam laughs and settles back a few inches, though he doesn’t remove his hand from Ronan’s stomach. “I’ll stop if we’re making you uncomfortable,” he offers.

Gansey looks like that is exactly the case, but he tries to play it cool by saying, “Oh, only as uncomfortable as anyone would be watching two of their best friends get to second base on their couch.” Adam grins and tosses back some snarky reply that Blue doesn’t catch, but which makes Ronan laugh and Gansey sit up to better flip them both off. She’s more interested in the idea of their banter than its exact dialogue, and so she just watches vaguely as she leans back on her palms, feeling dreamy and larger than life once again.

Eight years and one day ago, Noah Czerny died so that Richard Campbell Gansey III could live. She still doesn’t know why it worked out that way, what higher order of magic decreed who survived while the other died, but the bittersweet gratitude it instills in her is as strong as ever.

Here is what she does know: they were both always going to be impermanent in her life, and the fact that she’s managed to keep hold of even one is miracle enough. Here is what else she knows: the apartment is dark and warm, and Gansey is still breathing, and losing herself in melancholy reflection on how this life was built on a death will only waste the opportunity that that death gave them all.

Noah is gone. Noah will never not be gone. Just as knowing that larger forces were at work does nothing to mitigate the pain of his loss, so does poking and prodding at the _why_ of it all do nothing to make it any more understandable. Sometimes remembrance is the best anyone can do.

Blue leans her cheek against Gansey’s shoulder and breathes with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As much as I seem incapable of writing a chapter without Pynch, I do really love Bluesey as well, so this was my attempt at expressing that love. I find them harder to write (both as characters and as a couple) so I don't know how well I pulled it off.
> 
> When your teenage friend group includes a couple, there are two ways that can go: either they express little to no affection in front of the rest of you, or they never take their hands off each other. I had both types of couples in my friend groups as a teenager and have found that as long as everyone likes both members of the couple, no one really minds how much PDA they get up to. (If you don't like one or both people in the couple, though, oh boy does shit get unpleasant fast.) Maybe that's not a universal thing, but it's how I think the Gangsey would handle their couple dynamics.
> 
> I listened to "[Let The Mystery Be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlaoR5m4L80)" and "[All Flesh Is Grass](http://auroralynches.tumblr.com/post/145691958564/all-flesh-is-grass-by-chris-massa-as-performed)" a lot while writing and editing this, hence the tone of the last few paragraphs. Do you ever think about how the gang will probably never know that Noah was the one who chose to save Gansey all those years ago and just cry? I want to believe that Gansey figured it out at some point after Cabeswater brought him back the second time, but I don't know that that's realistic. That's not a complaint about the canon—I loved Noah's story arc—but he was very much written as a tragedy, and besides, I kind of like the idea of the characters needing to move on without having all the answers. (Like I said, I listened to those songs a LOT.)


	14. March 31st

They're in a forest that's not nearly so pretty as Cabeswater, but which is the next best thing they’ve found yet. Gansey has been trying to explore it further, but at the moment, they're all just sitting in a loose group on the floor of a smallish glade, killing time until they have to return to civilization.

Adam, eyelids badly losing the fight against gravity, sinks his head onto Ronan’s lap with a soft sigh; Ronan idly pushes a hand into Adam’s hair in response. He can never resist the opportunity to put his hands against Adam, to press palms flat and feel him alive beneath his skin. It’s a language of reassurance they hold in common, a pattern of gentle touches and affectionate gestures that remind them both: _I’m here. I want this. I’m still in it if you are._ Ronan knows it’s a language they’re both going to need more than ever after tonight. If things go their way, their hypothetical future will become real and breakable; if they don’t, he’s prepared to burn the Ivy League to the ground.

Gansey observes Adam’s repose and asks, “Do you have work tonight, Adam?” His tone says: _Please tell me you don't have work tonight._ It’s as much concern for Adam’s obvious exhaustion as it is observance of today’s significance.

“Three hours at Boyd’s,” Adam says.

“Can you come over afterwards, then?” Gansey asks, just as Blue wonders aloud, “When do you _sleep?_ ”

Adam half-shrugs and doesn't actually answer either question. Ronan rubs a lock of Adam’s hair absentmindedly between his thumb and forefinger. He wonders if it should really be called a lock of hair when the hair is this short and straight. He wonders if he should make a joke about how Adam's hair is the only thing straight about him besides his grades and his teeth. “You could always try meth,” he suggests. “That’d wake you _right_ the fuck up.”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Adam says, but he sounds more amused than annoyed.

Henry adds, “I doubt any of us know where to get meth anyways.”

“It can’t be _that_ hard,” Gansey says doubtfully.

“Let’s maybe not investigate that hypothesis,” Blue suggests.

Adam laughs aloud at that, and promises to be at Monmouth as soon as his shift is done.

* * *

Gansey is going to wear a hole straight through the floor of Monmouth Manufacturing and go crashing into the still-wild first story. It’s been hours since he checked the time, surely—no, three minutes. Fuck. He feels absurd for being this anxious, especially when he should be celebrating his own admission to Yale, but he continues to pace.

The problem is that it was never truly in question whether or not he’d be admitted—his family name all but guaranteed that he would be, even if his grades hadn’t been as good as they are. In a way, his life has always been somewhat set for him: he was either to die tragically young (a highly overrated experience, in his seasoned opinion), or to attend a fancy university at which he could carry on the Gansey family legacy of being rich and impressive; the only doubt about his life has always been its length. Adam’s future is far more precarious.

Rubbing a thumb across his lower lip, Gansey completes his fourth lap around the main floor of the warehouse.

“Sargent, could you let him out in the yard?” Ronan asks, though he doesn’t look at her when he speaks, instead watching Opal feed Chainsaw blueberries one at a time. “I think we didn’t take him for a long enough walk earlier.”

Blue directs her reply to Gansey instead of Ronan. “Gansey, sit _down_. It’s not gonna happen any faster if you keep worrying about it.”

“That’s what she said,” says Henry. Ronan snickers as Blue and Gansey both give them contemptuous looks. Gansey perches uneasily at the edge of his bed, checks his watch, and waits for Adam.

* * *

Adam sometimes feels bigger than his body. It was how he had felt all the time when he was connected to Cabeswater, his mind subconsciously pulsing with the ley line as naturally as his heartbeat. It takes more effort to feel that way nowadays, but he's getting better at it, learning the difference between doing magic and being the Magician.

He doesn't feel that way now. Now, his entire world has narrowed to the pinprick focus of Ronan’s laptop screen, the rest of Monmouth dark and blurry around it. He’s painfully aware that this is a culmination of sorts, a moment that will determine whether or not the last three years of his life were worth the struggle. His face is completely blank, but his heart is beating the inside of his chest black and blue. He can't bear to know. He has to know.

Hands shaking, he types in his password.

He reads. He blinks. He reads again.

“So, I got into Harvard.”

There’s a moment of silence, then—

“Holy fucking shit, Adam,” Ronan says, pride and relief breathing through his words like mist through trees.

Gansey, Blue, and Henry echo the sentiment in rather milder terms, their tension audibly unknotting and rolling away off their voices. “Honestly,” Gansey admits, “this means a lot more to me than my own acceptances.” Henry and Blue murmur their agreement.

_This means a lot more—what?_ Adam’s mind is sluggish, exhaustion and the adrenaline hangover tangling to form a block in his thoughts. _This means more to Gansey than his own acceptances. This means more to_ all of them _than their own acceptances._ He’s not sure how to feel. He spent the first eighteen years of his life knowing that no one cared about his future but him, and now he has people who not only care, but prioritize him over themselves.

It’s an illogical idea, but he strangely understands it. He’s starting to think that that’s what love is supposed to feel like—wanting more for another person than you want for yourself.

Ronan taps the back of his hand, then threads his fingers into Adam’s. Adam focuses. He squeezes Ronan’s fingertips, gently, once. He turns his head slightly, makes eye contact, holds his gaze. _I’m still in it if you are._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adam Parrish's college acceptances mean more to me than my own college acceptances, too. That said, I know I have Young People reading this fic, so to you I say: don't worry too much about college acceptances, because the name and prestige of a school has no correlation to how good a fit that school actually is for you. I went to an extremely prestigious college and was so miserable I dropped out, but the community college 20 minutes from my house was the best academic environment I've ever been in. Being happy at a less "impressive" school is more important than being unhappy at a fancy one.
> 
> Anyways, this update actually started as two totally unrelated drabbles that I smashed together, then added a third POV (Gansey's) to so that I could really round out the trio of perspectives on the American College Application Experience™. I never actually applied to college in high school, but I've been through multiple rounds of transfer applications (still waiting to hear back about my latest application, actually), so I assume the stress levels are pretty similar.
> 
> My finals and various personal obligations are now over, so hopefully I should be able to update more frequently from here on out!


	15. May 18th

Adam enters Monmouth Manufacturing to find a loud discussion already in full swing. “I’m not saying that mine was _worse_ ,” Gansey says, sounding frustrated, “I’m saying that you can’t dismiss its significance just because you don’t personally care.”

“I can and I will,” Ronan shoots back, though he seems more bored than genuinely annoyed.

Adam leaves his bag by the door and heads towards the couch on and around which the group is gathered. “What are we talking about?” he asks.

“Regrettable crushes,” Henry explains. “Right now, Lynch and Ganseyman are debating whether kidnapping and attempted murder is worse than defacing an irreplaceable piece of world history.”

Adam shrugs. “Apples and oranges.” He drops a quick kiss to the top of Ronan’s head in greeting, then takes a seat on the floor in front of the couch, settling his back against Ronan’s legs.

Blue takes advantage of the momentary distraction to draw Gansey and Ronan’s focus away from their argument. “So, Adam, what about you? Most regrettable crush: go.”

Adam mentally sifts through his scant romantic history. He’s always kept his attractions close to his chest with both men and women; he almost never let them escape his own mind out of fear they would become something real and therefore potentially painful. Regrettable—maybe Blue? No, that’s rude, and it’s hardly accurate anyways, especially when— _oh, God_. “Promise you won’t judge me?” he asks, his skin crawling with the memory of the crush.

Ronan taps him lightly with the side of his foot. “I mean, there’s no way it can be worse than mine, so,” he says, shrugging.

“Okay, so…” Adam blows out his lips. “First of all, I’d like to stress that it only lasted about three minutes, and it ended the moment he said his name. That being said, on the first day of school this year, I—” he braces himself, then plunges forward, “—I thought Colin Greenmantle was, for lack of a better term, pretty hot. I’m really sorry,” he adds, twisting his head to look up at Ronan apologetically.

Ronan stares back at him in a way that suggests he might be having an aneurysm. “Okay, I lied, that is _so much fucking worse_ than mine,” he says.

“You said you wouldn’t judge me,” Adam reminds them all.

“Yeah, but…” Gansey struggles, seemingly lost for words. “ _Greenmantle_ , Jesus. Didn’t you frame him—I mean, he killed— _Jesus_.”

“It was before I knew who he was!” Adam protests again. “I thought he was just some random Latin teacher.”

“Greenmantle killed Jesus?” Henry asks. “Man, he was worse than I thought.”

Blue laughs, quickly pulling the conversation out of its potential spiral. “Well, at least now my answer won’t seem as bad in comparison to all of you,” she says. “My most regrettable crush was definitely Gansey.”

Gansey yelps a shocked and slightly hurt, “Jane!”

“Damn, Sargent, that’s cold,” Ronan says admiringly.

“If you two’re about to break up, please let the rest of us leave the room first,” Adam says. Silently, though, he thanks her for changing the topic away from his temporary interest in Greenmantle, and he hopes she recognizes the gratitude in his voice.

“No, God, that’s not what I meant,” Blue says, exasperated. “We’re fine now, it’s just that a lot of bad things happened because of how we both dealt with our feelings for each other, and I regret all the hurt and arguments that it caused. We both lied more than we should have.”

Ronan nods sagely. “When you have a crush on a friend, you have to just be mature and straightforward about it,” he agrees.

Adam rolls his eyes. “You broke into my car to leave me a mixtape and hand lotion,” he reminds him, shoving playfully at Ronan’s knee with his shoulder. “That’s not exactly what I’d call mature and straightforward.”

“Your face is mature and straightforward,” Ronan says.

Blue makes a disgusted noise somewhere in her throat. “Okay, despite Ronan being—” she flaps a hand vaguely in his direction, “Ronan-y, he offers good advice. If you have a crush on a friend, you should just be honest about it. Especially if said friend is Gansey, who is an Olympic medalist in avoiding issues. No offense, Gansey.”

“It’s irrelevant anyways,” Gansey says, mild and unperturbed. “It’s not like anyone else here has had a crush on me.”

The room seems to go extremely quiet at that. Henry shifts in his seat. Adam raises his eyebrows. Ronan becomes very preoccupied with picking at his fingernails.

Gansey notices their discomfort and frowns. “Am I wrong?”

Henry avoids eye contact. Ronan smirks a little, though he doesn’t look up. Adam tilts his head in self-assured confirmation, as if to say, _What, didn't you know?_

Gansey’s eyes widen with surprise. “That’s… really flattering, actually,” he says, pressing a hand to his heart and going faintly pink. The resultant picture makes him look so much like a debutante Southern belle that laughter spurts unexpectedly through Adam’s closed lips. He wipes his eyes and apologizes, but Ronan is already laughing too, bent double on the sofa to press his face into Adam’s hair.

Eventually, Henry must return to Litchfield House, and the remaining group splits into pairs: Blue and Gansey in the main apartment, Adam and Ronan in Ronan’s bedroom. They sit cross-legged on Ronan’s bed, facing each other; Adam can see every delicate angle of Ronan’s face and throat made stark and colorless by the full, white moon shining outside the bedroom window. Quietly, he says, “I really am sorry, you know. About Greenmantle.”

Ronan’s eyebrows knit together. “Don’t be,” he says, but he doesn’t look at Adam when he says it.

Adam reaches out and cups Ronan’s cheek gently in one hand, turning his face back towards him. Ronan’s eyes flicker towards Adam’s and away again; the moonlight mutes the beauty of his irises, turning their normal blue to a washed-out gray. “Ronan,” Adam says, and nothing more.

Ronan presses his hand over Adam’s where it’s pressed to his cheek, and looks at him again. This time, he doesn’t look away. “Don’t be sorry,” he repeats. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I know,” Adam says, “but it can’t have been easy for you to hear.”

“It wasn’t great,” Ronan admits. “But, I mean—Christ, it’s not the end of the world. You liked his face, it’s not like you actively fucking conspired with him to ruin my life.”

Adam rubs his thumb over Ronan’s cheekbone. “As long as we're okay.”

“We are,” Ronan promises. Adam smiles and kisses him softly. When he pulls away, Ronan adds, “Although, if you’re trying to tell me you have a thing for teachers, we’re going to have a problem. I mean, how unoriginal can you get?”

Adam laughs louder than he should and says, “You are such an asshole.” Ronan smiles like a wolf. They kiss again, hungrier this time, until Ronan knocks over a dream creation that sends a spray of glowing orbs into the air around them. Adam gasps a little, surprise or delight or both filling his lungs, and they break apart to lie contentedly on their backs, watching the light dance across the walls of the darkened room. Ronan’s eyes are blue, blue, blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a thing that's been sitting around unfinished for weeks, and so I decided to finish it in honor of Adam's birthday. I mean, it has nothing to do with Adam's birthday, but that was the inspiring factor. Dialogue-heavy fics are not my strong suit, and I barely edited this at all, so I may very well end up hating it, but writing something without huge blocks of introspection or weird metaphors was an interesting challenge.
> 
> Everyone in the gang has had a crush on Gansey at some point. I don't make the rules, sorry. Also, Gansey has definitely had a crush on someone he met on his adventures abroad, only for that person to turn out to turn out to, like, willfully damage a World Heritage Site, or practice shitty archaeological standards, or something along those lines. It has nothing to do with him and he couldn't have prevented it, but he just can't believe he'd be into someone like that.
> 
> Happy birthday, Adam Parrish.


	16. December 6th

The rain comes quickly in the night. When Adam went to bed, the stars were clear and full outside Matthew’s bedroom window; this morning, he can’t even see out to the tree line at the edge of the nearest field. The valley that cradles the Barns is completely obscured in rain and stubbornly clinging fog, only the vaguest looming shadows behind the low clouds attesting to the mountains’ presence.

His head is dry and reedy as he reluctantly sits up and lets the warm, quilted blankets fall away. Flexing his feet against the uneven floor, he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes as if to force alertness into them. It’s a Saturday, the first day of Aglionby’s reading period before final exams, and Adam is unnerved to realize that he has no structured plans for the entire day—no work, no classes, no hunting for dead Welsh kings. He wants to take advantage of the time to study and to revise his final paper for English Lit, but instead, he leaves his backpack untouched in the corner of the room and picks his way quietly downstairs.

Ronan is standing barefoot in the middle of the living room, aiming a remote at the TV. When Adam draws closer, he can hear the klaxon shriek of a flood warning, reduced to a whisper volume to avoid waking the other inhabitants of the house. It’s a kind but pointless gesture, as Opal skitters into the room shortly after him, clearly awake and ready to face the day. Adam wonders if she even needs to sleep, or if she merely does it out of consideration for human schedules; no matter how early or late the hour, she never seems to mind being awake.

“The main road’s flooded,” Ronan says without looking up at them. He gestures with the remote towards the chipper blonde news anchor on the television screen. “We’re stuck here until she says it’s clear.”

“Like you were planning on going anywhere today anyways,” Adam says. Ronan acknowledges the point with a silent head tilt. Adam wanders to the kitchen, Opal cantering behind him, and rummages vaguely for food that won’t require him to use any dishes. He pulls a box of donuts from a bread drawer that, for some reason, also contains a steak knife and three canisters of loose leaf tea. Tearing a glazed donut in half, he offers a piece to Opal on a paper napkin, which she hesitantly accepts. It’s stale.

Ronan joins them in the kitchen, the local news channel evidently having lost its charm, and drums his fingers against the countertop. “I’m gonna go check on the animals,” he announces after a moment. “You can come along if you want, brat. You too, Pa—Adam,” he swiftly corrects himself. In the month or so they’ve been together, they’ve both gradually begun to drop their surname-only addresses to each other, a holdover from the affectedly masculine rules of conversation at Aglionby. Without the pretense of platonic friendship dictating their interactions, first names are no longer such a sacred thing.

The animals that remain at the Barns are still asleep and have survived many rainy days before this with no one to check on them, but Adam knows there’s no point in mentioning this to Ronan. _Being in a magic coma_ , Ronan would say, _isn’t an excuse to treat them like assholes_. So boots are pulled onto feet and rain cloaks are located and donned, and the three of them head as an uneven unit towards the scattered barns while Chainsaw watches them suspiciously from the shelter of the back porch.

Just as Adam had thought, all of the animals are fine, but he isn’t bothered by the unnecessariness of these rounds. He loves seeing Ronan take such attentive care of the property, checking each beast for dampness or injury, searching each wall and roof for leaks. It’s impossible not to see, watching Ronan like this, how ill-suited he is to any life outside of the Barns; he inhabits this place so fully as to render it magic in a manner entirely separate from Niall Lynch’s dreamed impossibilities.

When they step back in the house, Opal shakes the water from her cloak like a dog and careens towards the living room as soon as she’s freed of the cloak’s plastic confines. “Wipe your feet, you little monster!” Ronan yells after her.

“Hooves,” Adam corrects.

Ronan glances at him, then back to the doorway Opal disappeared through. “Hooves, whatever!” he calls. Opal ignores him completely and continues to crash happily through the house.

Leaving their wet boots at the door, they head after her and find her sitting on one of the leather sofas, her muddy hooves held conscientiously away from the upholstery. Ronan picks her up with a surprising lack of protest on her part, and she rests her chin on his shoulder as he carries her towards the kitchen. Adam watches them retreat for a moment, then heads back upstairs to grab his backpack and change his clothes. It’s barely 8 AM, but already he’s starting to worry that he’s wasting the day.

When he returns to the living room, he finds Opal, her hooves washed clean and dried, busily yanking pillows and cushions off of the furniture while Ronan drags a large wicker basket full of blankets out from where it had been tucked between a sofa and the wall. Chainsaw, who had been gripping the thin, rigid back of one of the stripped chairs and hollering cheerfully at both of them, notices Adam first and flaps over to perch on his shoulder instead.

Adam frowns. “Are you… looking for something?” he asks uncertainly.

Ronan shakes his head, but before he can explain, Opal happily announces, “Blanket fort! Ronan says he used to make them on rainy days.”

Adam grins wickedly at Ronan. “He _did_ , did he?”

“You don’t get to make comments unless you’re going to help,” Ronan says.

In response, Adam picks up one of the cushions Opal has pulled to the floor and balances it carefully on its side, forming the beginning of a wall. Ronan grins.

They build quickly and quietly, Chainsaw hopping around plucking at blankets, Ronan occasionally stopping to rebuild piles that tumble partway through construction. After the same wall collapses three times in short order, Adam suggests, “You’re gonna need to support that with a few more pillows at the base.”

Ronan raises his eyebrows. “I didn’t realize we had a master architect in our midst,” he comments, but he adds another pillow to the structure.

Adam scoffs. “Oh, please, I’m not going to be an architect.”

“What are you going to be, then?” Ronan asks, but not unkindly. He sounds genuinely curious—and Adam supposes he has every right to be, given that there’s a strong chance Adam will be around long enough for his career choice to directly impact Ronan’s life as well.

Shrugging as he passes an extra pillow across the few feet between them, Adam admits casually, “I’m not sure yet. For a long time I was thinking something in law or business, but now I’m considering medicine instead.”

“Oh, yeah? Gonna be raking in those, what, plastic surgeon bucks?” Ronan grins, a little sarcastically.

“Actually,” Adam says, “I was thinking pediatrics.”

Ronan’s grin doesn’t lessen, but it softens just a little. “Yeah,” he says, “I think you’d be good at that.”

Before Adam can ask what makes him say that, Opal appears on her hands and knees through the blanket-draped entrance of the fort, pushing Adam’s backpack in front of her. “You left this on the table,” she informs him, then wriggles into his lap.

“Thanks.” He pulls the backpack closer to him and takes out a textbook, then, after a moment’s thought, props it open on Opal’s lap, his arms crooked comfortably around her. “Do you mind if I read like this?” he asks. She shakes her head no. “Okay, good.”

As Ronan distracts himself with his laptop and some game about extraordinarily violent goats, Adam forces himself to concentrate on the textbook in front of him. He enjoys biology well enough, and he desperately wants to cram as much schoolwork as he can today, but the warm, softly lit interior of the fort is offering sleep as a tempting alternative. Before he gets a chance to seriously consider putting his textbook away, however, Opal points at a diagram in the upper right corner of the page and asks, “What’s that?”

Adam examines the picture and realizes he actually recognizes it. “That’s a drawing of different types of bacteria,” he explains. “You know bacteria, right, germs?” Opal nods. “Well, they have this coating called a cell wall, and one of the ways scientists tell different types of bacteria apart is by the differences in that wall. See how the one on the left has a thinner wall, and the one on the right has a thicker one?” He explains, in simplified, child-friendly terms, the basic ideas of microbiology, then how it relates to epidemiology, and from there moves on to human biology. Opal, as a non-human of indeterminate physiology, is particularly interested in that section, constantly asking in wide-eyed wonder _why_ each system works the way it does. By the time noon rolls around and Ronan pushes his way out of the fort in search of food, Adam has covered his entire study guide in conversation with Opal.

Ronan returns with half a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a knife, and a bottle of milk. He settles a bit closer to Adam and Opal than he was before, placing the food in the narrow space between them. The blanketed doorway of the fort didn’t fully close behind him, and Adam can see through the thin, pale gap that the rain has only strengthened since the morning, beating frantically on the windows and gusting through the fields like so many shapeless ghosts.

The peanut butter is chunky and organic and significantly more expensive than the store brands Adam grew up on; the bread contains three different types of seeds, and the milk is in a glass bottle. “Wow, someone hit the farmer’s market recently?” Adam ribs, raising his eyebrows at Ronan.

“Yeah, on Thursday, actually,” Ronan shoots back. He cracks open the peanut butter, spreads a generous portion on a slice of bread, and takes a bite, washing it down with a swig directly from the milk bottle. Adam makes a face, but takes some food for himself, and accepts the bottle when Ronan passes it to him. Opal, for her part, would likely be just as happy to eat the actual jar as she would be to eat the peanut butter inside, but Ronan claims he doesn’t want to clean up a mess like that and fixes her her own sandwich instead. Adam smirks at this. Ronan points the butter knife at him in a less-than-threatening way.

The afternoon passes similarly to the morning: Adam studies, Ronan doesn’t, and Opal takes turns finding entertainment with each of them. Around 4 PM, Adam realizes that she hasn’t made noise in a while, and, much to his surprise, looks over to find her asleep, half of her tiny body on Ronan’s lap and half on the blankets beside him. “Is she napping?” he asks in a whisper.

Ronan gives him a bemused look. “The fuck else would she be doing?” he whispers back.

“I didn’t know she did that, is all,” Adam says. “I’ve never seen her sleep voluntarily before.”

Ronan cups a hand fondly over Opal’s round cheek. “She doesn’t like to sleep when you’re around,” he admits. Before Adam can take offense, he explains, “She’s so excited to see you that she wants to stay up as much as possible. Frankly, it’s fucking disgusting.”

Adam tries to come up with a witty retort, but his throat cramps too tightly for him to speak. He hides his expression by returning to his homework. Beside him, Opal mumbles in her sleep, and Chainsaw rolls happily in one of the blankets covering the floor of the fort.

Afternoon deepens to evening, and the rain finally begins to slow, the flood warning lifting with it. Dinner is more uneventful scrounging; when woken, Opal blearily declines food and insists she wants to stay in the fort overnight. When Adam gently points out that there isn’t room for him and Ronan to sleep there, she rolls one eye at him and says in a disdainful tone she could only have learned from Ronan, “ _You_ two don’t have to stay. Jesus.” They both crawl back out of the fort and manage to get themselves to the privacy of the front hall before collapsing against each other in a fit of laughter.

“I swear to God, she’s gonna be up at, like, two in the fucking morning now,” Ronan complains once his breathing has returned to normal.

“Dibs on not having to deal with it if she is,” Adam says.

“Obviously,” Ronan agrees. “What time do you have work tomorrow, nine?”

“Nine-fifteen. It’s a twelve-hour shift.”

“You’re fucking killing yourself with this schedule, you know.”

“It’s only for a few more months.”

“It doesn’t have to even be that long.” Ronan’s words carry an unspoken offer.

Adam’s jaw clenches. This is a conversation—argument—he’s had far too many times with Gansey, and he’s not about to have it with Ronan, too. “I just can’t,” he says. “I need to…” He trails off not out of uncertainty, but out of unwillingness to continue on this conversational path. _I need to do it myself. I need to know I’m_ capable _of doing it myself._

Ronan seems to understand, but clearly doesn’t agree. “Whatever,” he says shortly, and turns to head up the stairs towards his own bedroom.

Against his better judgment, Adam says, “Ronan, wait.” Ronan looks back, surprised. Adam hesitates. He’s not sure how to put what he wants into words, but there’s a gap between them that’s been pulling at him for some time, and their non-argument has widened it ever so slightly. He wants to close it for good.

Here is the breakdown, the detailed schematic: he’s spent quite a few nights at the Barns now, each time borrowing Declan or Matthew’s bed while Opal and Ronan sleep in their own rooms. He doesn't want it to bother him that he and Ronan go their separate ways each night—it’s not about sex, and anyways, they’re not _there_ yet—but he still feels a sting every time, a craving for intimacy left unfulfilled.

Here is the abstract: Adam’s nights are lonely without Ronan nearby.

“I’m tired of sleeping alone,” he says, and it’s a confession, and a challenge, and a leap of faith. Here is Adam Parrish’s heart, vulnerable: admitting a need he cannot meet on his own, and asking someone else to fulfill it. He feels like a trapeze artist flung through space.

Ronan catches him and does not stumble. “So am I.”

Adam takes one half-step forward and presses his right side against Ronan’s left. Tangles their fingers together, palm pressed to palm, wrist to wrist. The stairs and twisting hallways are so narrow that Adam’s left arm occasionally brushes into the walls; he can’t hear the soft hiss and thump of contact, but his skin prickles with it nonetheless.

They find their way to Ronan’s room, passing the master bedroom without acknowledgment as they do so. Prudence suggests that the larger mattress in there would be more comfortable, but grief whispers, _not yet, too soon, not yet, too soon_. So Adam instead curls nose-to-nose with Ronan in a bed only barely large enough for the two of them, and kisses him sweet and undemanding, and touches reverent fingertips to his jaw, his temple, the delicate skin between the outer corner of his eye and the crest of his cheekbone.

It’s nothing like when Ronan used to pass out on the floor of Adam’s apartment while Adam slept on his thin, frameless mattress a few feet away. This is easier, more natural; it took them far more energy to hold themselves as far apart as they did than it takes for them to be close. Adam’s mind gropes for a comparison and finds the rest of the world wanting. Magnets. Gravity. Ronan.

Adam shifts a little closer. Ronan’s hand cradles his hip.

Outside, the rain patters ever softer.

As Ronan’s breathing slows, Adam finds himself avoiding sleep, preferring to watch Ronan’s eyes flick beneath his lids as he dreams. Rural nights should be unimaginably dark, but the Barns always seems to have some sort of light source—a stray glowing orb, an unseasonally dreamt firefly, a porch lamp left burning. He can just make out the feathered shadows cast by Ronan’s eyelashes onto his cheeks. _Angels have landed on his eyelids_ —isn’t that from a book? Adam can’t remember.

Today was the slowest Adam’s life has felt in a long time. The past seven months have been breakneck, hurtling from ley lines to dreams to caves to demons, caroming off of forests and psychics and friendships with abandon. He and Ronan are no exception—their relationship was immediately one of long-term plans and careful negotiations of love, although they both have yet to say the word aloud.

In this moment, Adam feels like he can see his future with Ronan unrolling easily before him. It looks like warm blankets in winter, like summer nights full of crickets and fireflies, like slow and steady years. It looks like this day, again and again, in hundreds and thousands of different forms, for as long as they both want.

He doesn’t mind taking it slow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was so, so tempted to add an extra scene where Adam finally falls asleep, only to be woken up at like 2 AM by Ronan watching [that one Moonbase Alpha video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo) on his phone.
> 
> Anyways, this is the longest installment by a decent margin (clocking in at just under 3000 words), which means I have lots of notes!  
> -According to Google, Virginia in December has moderate precipitation and temperatures in the mid-to-high-30s Fahrenheit. I took that to mean the weather in this fic is theoretically plausible.  
> -Shoutout to Katherine (jehanthepoet on Tumblr) for suggesting blanket/pillow forts as a rainy day activity.  
> -One of my most ardent TRC headcanons is that Ronan definitely plays [Goat Simulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat_Simulator), hence the reference to a video game about violent goats.  
> -I’m pretty sure high school seniors typically take physics and not biology, but I haven’t taken a physics class since I dropped mine partway through my senior year of high school, so I decided to have Adam talk about microbiology instead. Adam teaching Opal stuff is one of my greatest weaknesses, and also, one of the best ways to study is to try to explain the material to someone else.  
> -To be clear, Ronan _totally did_ go to the farmer's market. Please take a moment to reflect on that image.  
>  -I decided Ronan turned a spare room at the Barns into Opal's bedroom rather than just giving her one of the existing bedrooms.  
> -"Angels have landed on his eyelids" is from _The View From Saturday_ by E.L. Konigsburg, which is also about a group of kind of weird nerds who come together to become something more. Except it's aimed at elementary schoolers and instead of magic there's a quiz bowl. It's a good book. Adam probably read it as a kid.  
>  -After all those apparent months of Ronan sleeping on the floor at Adam's apartment, I feel like them sleeping in the same bed for the first time would be a relationship milestone. Personally, I actually hate sleeping in the same bed as anyone else, but it seems like something Ronan and Adam would be into. And to be clear, they're _just_ sleeping. Like Adam said, it's not about sex, and they're not there yet anyways.
> 
> Everyone who leaves kudos or comments is a superhero.


	17. June 19th

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this update took so unreasonably long. Pokemon Go is a hell of a drug.

It’s a brutally hot day—angry, aggressive hot, the sort of weather that hisses of road rage and forest fires. Even the woods outside of town, normally dense and cool even in searing heat, are baking in the almost-summer sun. Henry is miserably uncomfortable as he trails after the others along a narrow deer-trampled path, but he knows he has to wait for Ronan to be the first to complain, or else he’s sure to face a merciless string of Canada jokes.

Luckily, the thing about waiting for Ronan Lynch to complain about something is that it rarely takes more than a few minutes. “Jesus, fucking Mary, it is one hundred goddamn degrees out here,” he announces, right on cue.

“Does it not bother you how often your choices of phrase could be seen as blasphemous?” Gansey asks from a few feet ahead on the path.

“I don’t see why you care,” Ronan replies, “seeing as I’m the only actual Christian here anyways.” Gansey frowns.

“It seems like a matter of intellectual curiosity.” This is Adam, wandering a little apart from the rest of the group in order to keep an eye on Opal.

Ronan looks annoyed, but humors them both with an answer. “I don’t care if you’re Protestant—” this is directed to Gansey, “—agnostic—” to Adam, “—or if you just really believe in telling people that Christmas was stolen from the pagans—” Henry’s not sure if this is meant for him or for Blue, who’s walking directly in front of him, but it’s accurate either way, “—but if you think God should sit around taking note of every time someone uses His name in vain, we have fundamentally different priorities.” He pauses, then adds, “Also, Gansey, there’s a saying about people in glass houses that seems applicable right about now.”

Gansey says, “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Everyone laughs at this, even Opal, who’s currently scratching at the bark of a dogwood tree several meters off the path. “You say ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ only slightly less often than you use any of our names,” Henry points out. “Speaking of which, _Jesus Christ_ , Gansey, how much farther until this place you were talking about?”

Gansey pauses in a patch of sunlight and shades his eyes with one hand, squinting between the clustered tree trunks. On anyone else, the gesture would look awkward, accompanied by unflattering facial expressions and likely a good deal of sweat; on him, it's the winning and sure pose of an intrepid explorer. Possibly one of those old-timey Victorian ones, albeit minus the mustache and the deeply colonialist attitude. “Not too long now,” he calls back. “Why, are your arms getting tired?”

“No, but I fear Sargent’s might be.”

“In your dreams,” says Blue, but her steps have been noticeable slower for the last quarter mile or so. She shifts the cooler from her right hand to her left to her right again.

This is why they're out here: a picnic. Ronan had loudly derided the idea as soon as it was proposed, but was outvoted by Adam and Opal, who actually _wanted_ to spend time with Gansey and Blue and Henry before they left on their road trip, _thank you very much_. And as it’s the end of finals and therefore the raven boys’ first taste of freedom in some time, it was agreed that Adam and Gansey and Henry should get the deciding votes in how to spend the afternoon. The location, however, was Gansey’s idea alone. He is still the de facto leader of this group, and they all trust his judgment and decisionmaking absolutely.

It takes rather more effort to continue trusting him when they hit mile three of the hike, however.

Just as Henry’s about to voice his concern that Gansey has gotten them lost, Gansey announces, “We’re here!” and disappears into a particularly large copse of trees. Pushing through into the grove, Henry finds the center to be a much larger and clearer space than he would have guessed from the outside. Against the far edge of the clearing is a jagged natural wall, stripes of moss, ferns, and creeping vines all crawling haphazardly across the rough gray rock. A thin ribbon of a waterfall, just barely forceful enough to have some body and noise to it, streams down the center of the wall into a pool at its base. The water winds its way out of the clearing perpendicular to the way they’d come in; everything around it is soft grass and smooth river rock, the shrubby undergrowth of the surrounding forest seeming to stop at the treeline.

Beside him, Blue catches her breath. “This is lovely,” she whispers, heat and sore arms momentarily forgotten in light of the view.

Adam is already over by the waterfall, inspecting it curiously. “Where does the stream come from?” he asks Gansey.

“There's a natural spring a couple miles from here. This is one of its smaller channels, but it's still on some of the more detailed maps of the area,” Gansey says in a slightly resigned sort of voice. Henry knows he's trying to hide his disappointment at the water’s decidedly nonmagical source.

“And why exactly,” Ronan asks, “did we have to hike all the way out here?”

Blue rolls her eyes and says sarcastically, “God forbid you experience nature.”

Ronan points at her. “Don't sass me, Sargent.”

In response, Blue drops her cooler to the ground and announces that she is not taking another _step_ with that thing until someone takes the food out of it. Henry places his smaller cooler rather more gently next to hers, and Gansey obliges them both by flipping the coolers open and pulling plastic containers from them, shaking the water and partially melted ice into the grass as he does.

The six of them settle along the banks of the pool with food and drinks, sheltering from the heat in the shade cast by the rock wall. Blue peels off her shoes and socks and dips her feet gracefully in the water. Leaning back on her palms, she pulls her hair free of its clips and shakes it out with a contented sigh. Henry follows suit, tossing his shoes on top of hers and cuffing his pants to keep them from getting wet. The water is shockingly cold, given the heat of the day, and he lets out a surprised gasp as it floods between his toes.

Blue opens one eye and levels him with a look that's equal parts unimpressed and amused. “ _Really_ , Cheng?” she asks, a hint of a laugh escaping around her words.

“My delicate sensibilities are unused to the feeling of nature against my bare feet,” Henry says wryly.

“What about the rest of you?” Blue asks. “Like your face and shoulders and stuff. I thought for sure you’d get some exposure to the real world around the straps of your bro tanks.”

“Only my forehead,” Henry answers, gesturing at his face. “Everything below that is shaded by my cheekbones.” When the line doesn't get the laugh he expected, he looks over at her and sees her dark head bent over an open container of fruit Gansey had passed her. She looks up with her cheeks bulging, and Henry realizes abruptly what this means, but he's too late, too late.

Blue spits a rapid-fire volley of watermelon seeds at him and grins cheekily. Henry wipes the juice and saliva from his face, plucks a particularly ambitious seed from his hair, and gives her a mock-offended look: mouth open, eyebrows innocent and wounded. His Ray-Bans have been knocked askew by the onslaught, so he removes them and folds them neatly into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“This,” he tells her solemnly, “means war.”

She grins up at him, every line of her face a challenge. Behind her head, the blue shadow of the trees stretches hungrily across the water. “Bring it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Henry POV. I've missed you.
> 
> I didn't actually plan to have any Sarchengsey in this fic, but I started writing this and they started flirting and, well, here we are. I really don't think they'd actually get together until sometime during the roadtrip, but that doesn't mean they can't have shippy interactions within the time frame of this fic. Plus, I multiship the hell out of Henry, so I don't want to commit to one specific ship for him in this fic.
> 
> The kudos and comments I get consistently make my entire day. Thank you, everyone.


	18. June 21st

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are.

And as quickly as it began, it’s over.

Blue had sat beside Gansey’s family. Adam had delivered his valedictorian speech. Walks were walked, diplomas were conferred, hats were tossed, and it was well and truly over. They had survived Aglionby Academy.

Ronan and Opal—disguised with a pair of flower-patterned rain boots—were picked up from Monmouth after the ceremony, and now the six of them are crammed into the Camaro, destination: 300 Fox Way, for an undefined graduation celebration. They don’t really have time—Adam has plans for the evening involving a certain trailer, Ronan and Opal want to explore the ley line, and Blue, Gansey, and Henry all need to finish preparing for their road trip—but Blue and Gansey’s families have insisted on finally meeting, and they’re all bracing themselves what is likely to be a glorious disaster of a culture clash.

The wild, anticipatory mood in the car is hampered somewhat by the close quarters—the backseat was never really meant to even hold three people, let alone four—and the melancholy song weeping out of the Pig’s aftermarket stereo. Around the third time Stevie Nicks reminds them that she’s getting older, too, Ronan snaps. “Jesus, Gansey, this song is fucking depressing. Don’t you have anything that isn’t, like, _The Very Best of Suburban Dad Rock_?”

“First of all,” Gansey replies, “You’re one to talk, _Dad_.”

“I’m a _dad_ with better taste in music than you.”

Gansey ignores this and continues, “Secondly, the best I can offer you is happy suburban dad rock.”

“Anything would be better than this shit.” Ronan shoves at the radio to emphasize his point. Gansey acquiesces, and at the next red light, he thumbs quickly through his phone to find something more upbeat.

A familiar keyboard progression begins to pound through the car. Four sets of eyes widen identically, and four voices cry, “Oh my _God_ , Gansey,” with varying levels of despair, amusement, and disdain. Even Opal seems to recognize the tune, though she doesn’t react beyond a quick slip of a smile.

“This song,” Gansey says primly, “is a classic.”

“A classic piece of shit,” Ronan mutters.

Blue sings along quietly in the back seat, which makes a weird amount of sense. After all, she’s a small-town girl herself.

“Did you know South Detroit doesn’t actually exist?” Henry comments. “It’s part of Canada.”

“How do you know that?” Adam asks.

Henry shrugs. “The internet.”

Blue continues to sing, and Gansey joins her. “Streetlight people,” he articulates.

“It’s ‘streetlights, people’,” Ronan corrects him.

Gansey’s grin is an explosion of happiness. “Got you! You like this song too!” he crows.

Ronan begins to swear a long and complicated curse, but tapers off after Adam leans forward to sling a loving arm over the seat back and across Ronan’s chest. “Oh, just give it up,” he says jovially. Tilting his head forward until his lips are almost brushing Ronan’s ear, he sings softly about a movie that never ends.

The song fades out as the Pig rolls up to the curb in front of 300 Fox Way. Helen’s glossy Audi is already parked and empty, and Gansey pales at the realization that his family and Blue’s family are currently together and unsupervised. Yanking the keys from the ignition, he climbs out of the car and heads up the walkway like a shot. Ronan exits almost as quickly, though his speed seems less to do with concern for the Gansey or Sargent families and more to do with eagerness to see the trainwreck surely happening inside.

The four passengers in the back squeeze out of the car in an orderly line, looking grateful for the sudden return of personal space. Gansey motions them all towards the front door, but is interrupted by Ronan telling them all to wait and pulling a folded piece of paper from his jeans pocket. He passes it over to Blue, who unfolds it to find a set of cryptic directions scrawled in blue ink. “That’s your graduation present.”

“A piece of paper covered in your shitty handwriting? Ronan, you shouldn’t have,” she says.

“Hilarious, Sargent.”

Gansey leans over to study the paper as well. “Directions to Blue’s present?” he asks. “Are you going to come with us to get it?”

Ronan shakes his head. “Too many bad memories.”

“That’s what you said about Aglionby, too,” Adam points out. Ronan merely shrugs in response, as if to say, _Yes, and it’s true_.

Henry rubs his hands together in anticipation and reaches for the doorknob. “Alright,” he says, “let’s get this show on the road.”

The meeting is every bit as gloriously terrible as they’d all hoped, with the Ganseys’ polite subtlety and charm blunting uselessly against the directness of psychic ability and no-bullshit personalities. While Henry and the youngest Gansey try desperately to mediate between the two factions and Adam watches Jimi fuss happily over Opal, Blue takes the opportunity to corner Ronan in the kitchen. Orla is sitting cross-legged on the counter, and Helen leans against the cabinets next to her. They’re both drinking wine out of chipped mugs. Blue ignores them entirely and demands, “Tell me what my graduation present is.”

Ronan continues to rummage aimlessly through drawers. “No.”

“Tell me!”

“I said no.”

Blue crosses her arms over her chest and draws herself up to her full five feet of height. “I refuse to participate in your stupid scavenger hunt until you tell me.” Ronan, who’s a foot taller than her if he’s an inch, raises an eyebrow in a coolly unimpressed sort of way. Blue contemplates her surroundings, trying to come up with an adequate threat, and hits upon the perfect one. “If you don’t tell me what it is,” she says, “I’m going to lock you in this kitchen and make you talk to Helen and Orla for the rest of the afternoon, and I _know_ how much you hate talking to them.”

“Rude,” Orla comments.

Ronan takes one look at the two of them and immediately relents. “It’s a car.”

Blue blinks. “A _car?_ ”

“Yeah,” Ronan says, “a car. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“I…” Blue struggles to react. It’s true that she’s wanted a car for a long time, and it’s also true that receiving one as a gift is really the only feasible way for her to get one within the next decade. But still—a _car_. It’s beyond ostentatious, especially when Ronan knows she’s spent more than a year refusing to let anyone buy her so much as a bag of chips. “I can’t accept a car,” she says finally. “It’s—it’s too much, and it’s _tacky_ , and I—I don’t want to be constantly spending money on gasoline and oil changes and whatever it is cars need!” She says the last part triumphantly, relieved to have found a legitimate-sounding excuse for rejecting Ronan’s gift.

Ronan, unfortunately, is unbothered. “It didn’t cost me anything,” he says calmly. “And as for gas money—let’s just say you’re gonna love what’s under the hood.”

“Why?”

“Sorry, Sargent. Gotta leave you with some mystery.” He takes advantage of her confusion to sidestep around her and head back to the living room.

Blue remains facing the counter for a moment, stunned, then whirls to follow him. She calls, “Wait—Ronan! Why am I—you can’t just leave me hanging like that! Ronan! _Lynch!_ ” Ronan laughs and presses on ahead of her through the dark hallways of 300 Fox Way.

Back in the living room, the atmosphere has somewhat mellowed. Maura and Jimi are making polite, if still tense, conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Gansey, and although Calla is glaring viciously at all of them, that likely has more to do with Calla being Calla than any genuine animosity she may be feeling. Henry and Gansey sit nearby, watching the interaction with the exhausted but proud look of new parents. Opal, meanwhile, has lost all interest in the proceedings and has crawled into Adam’s lap, babbling something to him half in English and half in Latin. Ronan makes a beeline for them, pulling Opal to her feet midsentence and telling her they’re going in the yard so Adam can get a break. Naturally, Adam ignores this flimsy excuse and goes with them.

Gradually, the other teens begin to drift into the backyard: Blue only a few minutes after Ronan and Adam, having quickly tired of the scene in the living room, and finally Henry and Gansey, at last satisfied that the house will not devolve into bloodshed without them. There aren’t nearly enough chairs outside for all six of them, so they instead sit in a casual, haphazard group among the roots of the beech tree. If Blue closes her eyes, she can still see the ritual Neeve performed in these roots last spring. She shivers.

“Is your dad in this tree right now?” Ronan asks Blue.

She leans her head back against the trunk and closes her eyes. “Yeah, he doesn’t leave it much.”

“Weird,” he comments.

“I don’t think it’s weird not to leave your skin,” Blue says.

“I meant the fact that your dad is a fucking tree.”

Adam says, “I don’t see how that’s any weirder than pulling things from your dreams.”

“Or being an actual satyr,” Gansey adds, glancing at Opal’s rain boot-covered hooves.

“It’s weirder,” Ronan says, “because only one of those things was a character in _Lord of the Rings_.”

“Are you referring to Ents?” Henry asks. “Because I do not recall any giant anthropomorphic trees wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blue and her father are more like dryads, if anything.”

“Oh my God, all of you, please stop talking,” Blue despairs. Gansey throws his head back and laughs.

There’s an edge to the sound, a sense of ending. In a few minutes they’ll all be parting ways, officially closing one era of their lives and opening another. A page turning, all of them balanced on the edge. They’ve survived high school, and this afternoon, and this impossibly long year. Everything is over, and everything has barely begun. At this moment, though, all there is is this:

In the grass beside them, a bee balances clumsily on a small, low-growing flower, then takes flight.

In the earth below them, the beech tree’s roots grow, tightening their hold on the earth.

In the leaves above them, branches tangle with more branches tangle with clouds tangle with a slowly drifting sun.

In the world around them, magic holds its breath and waits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually don't know if the correct lyrics are "streetlight people" or "streetlights, people". Different lyrics sites give different answers, and I like both options equally, so I just picked one arbitrarily. The bit about South Detroit is true, however.
> 
> This chapter was an experiment in writing from a third-person omniscient point of view. It's one I've never used before, and it doesn't show up very often in canon, either, so it was quite an interesting experience.
> 
> I had originally hoped for there to be a couple more chapters before I closed the lid on this fic—hence the several weeks between the previous update and this one (which I had already written most of shortly after I started this fic)—but none of the scraps I wrote amounted to anything interesting or substantial enough to justify posting. The only part really worth sharing is Ronan saying the line, "It's an impossibility, like dividing by zero or taking Blue's outfit seriously." Besides, now that this Dreamer Trilogy thing is happening, why write my own ideas when I can just wait and read Maggie's instead? (I'm totally kidding. Well, mostly kidding.)
> 
> But still, I've loved writing this fic. I've loved exploring these characters and filling in my own ideas about canon. I've loved every comment you've left me and every message I get on my Tumblr about it. (My Tumblr, by the way, is now astrailhads.tumblr.com, in case anyone wants to find me there!) If anyone who read this fic loved it even a fraction as much as I did—if it at all comforted you, or made you laugh even once—then, thank you.
> 
> Thank you for everything.


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